The Time Inc. chief executive tasked with leading the soon-to-be stand-alone company stands to reap as much as $4.75 million in salary and bonus next year.
Relatively new CEO Joe Ripp will get $1 million in base salary — the same as his predecessor — and a bonus of as much as $2.25 million, according to the company’s initial regulatory filing with the Security and Exchange Commission on Friday.
After forfeiting his bonus from his previous job to take over Time Inc., Ripp will also get “make whole grants” that could net him another $7.5 million over five years, payable in annual installments of $1.5 million a year.
He inked a five-year employment contract, which expires Sept. 4, 2018.
Time Inc. will also be paying off former CEO Laura Lang for the next two years. Lang — who held the job for only 19 months and didn’t make much of an impact — announced in March she would leave after plans for the spin-off were announced.
She will continue to receive her base salary of $1 million plus a $1.8-million-a-year bonus through Nov. 2, 2015.
Time Inc., the publisher of People, Sports Illustrated and Fortune, gave investors their first in-depth look at its finances Friday as it prepares to be spun off from parent Time Warner next year.
Once a cash cow that helped fuel growth for the entire company, Time Inc. has become the worst performer of the Time Warner bunch.
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes wants to jettison the unit to concentrate on other media holdings, including the Warner Bros. film studio and pay-TV channel HBO. He announced the spin-off in March after talks to sell the publishing unit to publicly traded Meredith Corp. broke down.
The filing with the SEC said only that the separation was expected “next year,” although Bewkes recently told analysts it was being pushed back to the second quarter.
In 2012, Time Inc. had revenue of $3.4 billion, down 7 percent from the previous year, while operating income fell 25 percent, to $420 million. Net income was $263 million, a 29 percent drop, the filing showed.
In the first nine months of 2013, revenue was off 3 percent, to $2.4 billion, compared to the same period a year ago. Net income was holding steady at about $135 million.
The filing did not detail how much debt Time Warner plans to layer on the company as part of the spinoff, although analysts peg it somewhere between $2 billion and $2.5 billion.
The filing revealed that People was responsible for nearly 20 percent of Time Inc.’s total revenue, which would put it in the range of $680 million in 2012.
About half of Time Inc.’s total revenue last year came from advertising, with one third from circulation and the remainder from “other” sources.
Ripp has already told staffers that the company is “no longer in the magazine business, we are in the media business.” But he has to convince Wall Street that the company can make a profitable transition to digital to augment print.