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Nanometrics names new prez/CEO, while ex-head honcho day trades |
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Aug 06, 2007 at 10:39 AM |
When long-time president/CEO John Heaton left Nanometrics in late March, no official reasons were given for his departure.
Subsequent efforts to find out what happened to him were met with "we'll get back to you's," then nonresponses and silence. Today's news that Nano has hired Tim Stultz, most recently of Imago, as its new prez/CEO ended the company's months-long executive search.
Bruce Rhine, who had been interim CEO, has solidified his own bona fides at the company, taking over the chairmanship from former chair and company founder, Vince Coates, who moves over to the vice-chair slot. Coincidently (or not), Nano released its quarterly financials last week, which showed the "first quarter of operating profitability in more than two years," according to a gleeful Rhine.
So what became of Heaton? Although his current professional status remains unknown to this reporter, a check of Nanometrics stock trading and SEC filings reveals some interesting details. According to the company's SEC Form 8-K filed July 10, Heaton was terminated, contrary to some reports characterizing his departure as a resignation. Of course, as the song goes, "did he jump or was he pushed?," and the line between being "fired" and "quitting" is often a thin one (although not as thin perhaps as the one immortalized in another song, "there's a thin line/ between love and hate," but I digress.)
As the SEC form notes, Heaton's package guaranteed him a year's salary from date of termination (reportedly $364,400) and accelerated vesting in 66,667 shares. The agreement also allowed him to "extend the deadline... to exercise his vested stock options" to a date before the aforementioned second-quarter results announcement.
No wonder Heaton has been a very busy man, buying and selling hundreds of thousands of company shares between May 1 and June 21, with a profit closing in on about a quarter-million dollars. Nineteen such legal churns of stock, to be precise. Then he turned around another 40,000 shares--for a tidy little profit---on July 11 and 13.
While Heaton's package details and recent profitable flurry of de facto day-trading may not add up to the kind of eight- and nine-digit deals doled out recently to underachieving corporate executives, his numbers look pretty good for many of us mere working folk.
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