Want to get an idea of just how rich Amdocs’s (NYSE: DOX) employees and managers are? This will give you some idea. Since Amdocs is listed on the New York Stock Exchange as an Israeli company, it doesn’t have to report the holdings of its managers in its share capital, or list which managers are included in its options plan. The only way to get an indication of how rich its managers and senior employees are is when one of them who is classified as a party at interest sells shares on the market. In Amdocs’s case, it is senior VP and chief product officer Harel Kodesh.
Kodesh is actually the only senior executive in the company that has chosen to sell some of his shares on the market, apparently in order to pay the cost of exercising his options on ordinary Amdocs shares. At the end of last week, Kodesh sold a block of 120,000 shares at an average price of $32, giving him $3.8 million.
This is Kodesh’s thrid sale of shares in less than a year, after selling shares twice in 2005. He sold shares for $1.2 million in March 2005, and for $1.8 million in July. His latest sale gives him a total of $6.8 million in the past year. It is reasonable to assume that Kodesh owns additional options and/or shares in Amdocs.
The short period that Kodesh has worked at Amdocs makes his sale of shares particularly conspicuous. Kodesh, 47 joined the company in 2003, less than three years ago. In 2002-2003, before he joined Amdocs, he was president and CEO of Wingcast, a joint venture of Ford Motor Company and QUALCOMM (Nasdaq: QCOM), which provides communications services for vehicles. In 1990-2000, he held a number of management positions at Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), including VP information appliance division in 1998-2000, and founded the Windows CE operating systems for handheld computers.
Kodesh’s sale of shares is useful in estimating the holdings of other company managers, especially the Israeli ones. If Kodesh managed to sell shares for a total gross of almost $7 million in only one year, it is reasonable to assume that president and CEO Dov Baharav holds shares or options with a current market value of tens of millions of dollars. The most recent annual document published by Amdocs shows that 16 senior executives in the company own 4.1% of its capital, including immediately exercisable options. This aggregate holding is worth almost $270 million. More than anything else, this figures highlights the wealth (on paper) of the billing giant’s managers.
Another figure supplied by Amdocs concerning the way it recompenses it employees is the salary cost of all its senior executives and board members -- $9.3 million for 18 people. Amdocs’s current market cap is $6.5 billion.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on January 26, 2006