Catching up on regulatory filings from Friday:
AmerisourceBergen Corp. , the wholesale drug distributor, issued its proxy statement Friday for its upcoming shareholders meeting.
The company, with its headquarters in the Chesterbrook Corporate Center in Chester County, is one of the nation's three biggest drug distributors behind Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. So naturally, AmerisourceBergen would compare itself, and the pay of its top executives, with those companies.
But the compensation committee casts a wider in assembling a 13-member "peer group" for benchmarking purposes. Besides Cardinal and McKesson, AmerisourceBergen believes it competes with the following for executive talent:
Costco Wholesale Corp., CVS Caremark Corp., Home Depot, Inc., Ingram Micro Inc., Kroger Co., Safeway Inc., Supervalu Inc., Sysco Corp., Target Corp., United Parcel Service Inc. and Walgreen Co.
No, those aren't all health care-related. Names like Target, Home Depot and Supervalu (parent of Acme Markets Inc.) might seem odd to benchmark against. But think of it this way: all of these companies have in common national distribution systems and spend heavily on information technology to keep themselves at or near the top of their respective fields.
The compensation committee used that group to justify a new performance-based long-term incentive award for AmerisourceBergen CEO R. David Yost. If the company hits certain earnings per share and total shareholder return targets, Yost stands to earn a cash incentive of between $2.7 million and $4.05 million depending on how far the company's financial performance exceeds those targets.
Yost earned a salary of $1.13 million for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2007. He also received 11,667 shares of restricted stock, valued at $645,418 on Feb. 15 the day it was awarded. The same day he was awarded 107,300 options to buy shares at a strike price of $54.13 per share.
During the fiscal year, Yost exercised previously awarded options -- covering a total of 163,505 shares -- generating a gain of $5.27 million. As of Nov. 30, Yost owned 1.1 percent of AmerisourceBergen shares, or a total of 1,807,936 shares.
