News Corp CEO Murdoch’s pay falls 6 pct to $16.8 mln, Carey starts as president with $23 mln

News CEO Murdoch’s pay falls 6 pct in fiscal 2010

LOS ANGELES — News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch’s total compensation fell 6 percent in fiscal 2010, even though the company grew profits thanks to “Avatar” and a rebounding advertising market, according to an Associated Press review of a securities filing.

Murdoch, 79, saw his compensation fall to $16.8 million from $18 million a year ago. His salary was unchanged at $8.1 million, but his performance-based pay fell nearly 20 percent to $4.4 million. New stock and option grants worth $4.1 million were about the same as he received the previous year.

Regardless of his annual take-home pay, Murdoch is a billionaire by virtue of the 317 million Class B voting shares and 8.8 million Class A non-voting shares that he controls. Together, the shares were worth $4.58 billion as of Tuesday.

News Corp., which is based in New York, was on a roll in the last fiscal year, which ended in June. James Cameron’s 3-D spectacle, “Avatar,” grossed $2.75 billion worldwide in theaters and broke DVD and Blu-ray sales records when it was released on home video in April. Advertising revenue also emerged stronger coming out of the recession.

For the full year, News Corp. operating profits rose 11 percent to $3.96 billion while revenue rose 8 percent to $32.8 billion.

Its shares also rose 33 percent over the year, finishing June 30 at $11.96, compared to $9.01 a year earlier. On Tuesday, the widely traded Class A shares rose 23 cents, or 1.9 percent, to close at $12.54.

Meanwhile, Chase Carey, the 56-year-old former DirecTV CEO who rejoined News Corp. as its president in July last year, received $23.1 million in total pay, thanks to a $10 million signing bonus and a guaranteed $5 million bonus tied to the company’s earnings per share. His $8.1 million salary was the same as Murdoch’s.

In the current fiscal year, Carey’s salary is being halved to $4.05 million, but his target cash bonus will be $10 million to $20 million, and he will receive performance stock units targeted to be worth $10 million, with their value increasing with the value of the shares.

The Associated Press compensation formula aims to isolate the value a company’s board placed on an executive’s total compensation package during the last fiscal year. In general, it includes salary, bonus, performance-related bonuses, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted during the year.

The calculations don’t include changes in the present value of pension benefits, and they sometimes differ from the totals companies listed in the summary compensation table of proxy statements filed with the SEC, which reflect the size of the accounting charge taken for the executive’s compensation in the previous fiscal year.