New NCR CEO wants to buy
Nuti also wants to control costs while filling in product line
By John Nolan
Dayton Daily News
daytondailynews.com
DAYTON | NCR Corp. has vibrant businesses, in particular its Teradata data warehousing unit, and will focus on growing those businesses and controlling costs, the company's new chief executive, William Nuti, said Tuesday.
Any acquisitions that NCR might pursue would be smaller "gap-fillers" that would fill out its product lineup of automated teller machines, retail point-of-sale checkout systems and the Teradata services that help airlines, banks and other major customers store large amounts of information, Nuti told industry analysts in a conference call.
He didn't elaborate on which types of businesses NCR might want to buy during his tenure.
Nuti doesn't officially begin his duties as NCR's president and CEO until Monday, but he addressed the analysts with the approach of someone who is poised to make decisions right away.
"The company has very solid businesses. ... I think all of the businesses have an opportunity to grow organically," he said. "I'm going to take every minute I can in this honeymoon period to really get to know this company, its managers, its customers."
NCR's board did not disclose how many candidates it examined for the CEO job. Nuti said he first met with NCR's board about three months ago.
Nuti will be paid a $1 million annual salary plus a management incentive bonus of up to $2 million a year, with a minimum annual bonus of $500,000 guaranteed for this year, NCR told the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
The bonus amount is to be based on company financial performance. That compensation is similar to what Nuti received in his last job as president and CEO of Symbol Technologies Inc., a bar-code scanners manufacturer based in Holtsville, N.Y.
In addition, NCR granted Nuti 85,000 shares of restricted stock, use of the corporate aircraft for some personal travel and options to buy up to 650,000 shares of NCR's common stock, with 400,000 of those options tied to whether the company meets specified financial goals.
Nuti met on Tuesday with company leaders and employees on his second day at NCR's Dayton headquarters since arriving Monday, when the company announced it had hired him.
James M. Ringler, the interim NCR chief executive who also became board chairman last week when predecessor Lars Nyberg stepped down, said he will spend the coming months working with Nuti to help him get started. Ringler gave no indication how long he plans to remain as chairman, or whether the title will be passed to Nuti anytime soon.
"Clearly, we think Bill is going to be a great leader for us," Ringler told the analysts. "We look to him to lead our company into the future."
NCR has recently preferred to operate with a chairman who holds that title separately from the president/CEO. Nyberg served as chairman while Mark Hurd, the former NCR boss who left in March for Hewlett-Packard Co., was the chief executive from 2003 until this year.
Nuti joined Symbol Technologies in August 2002 as president and chief operating officer, moving up to CEO in December 2003. He previously served 10 years with Cisco Systems Inc., a maker of computer hardware and software for Internet networks.
Nuti oversaw international and U.S. operations for Cisco Systems, living and working in Singapore and Beijing. He said that gave him a territorial familiarity that should help him seek new business for NCR in China, a growth market coveted by American companies.
Nuti told analysts that his new job at NCR will be a welcome contrast to Symbol Technologies, where he had to clean up an accounting fraud scandal that he inherited from prior management.
NCR's shares (NYSE:NCR) closed Tuesday at $33.99, up by 52 cents, or 1.5 percent, after having fallen by $1.24 on Monday, the day Nuti's hiring was announced. NCR's stock has traded at between $21.01 and $39.84 during the past year. |
