CONTINUING COVERAGE
AJC Reporter Russell Grantham is tracking what Georgia’s major public companies pay their top executives. Look for periodic news and trend stories in the weeks ahead, as well as up-to-date statistics, as Grantham pores through this year’s corporate proxy statements.
RPC Inc. paid its chief executive almost $3.2 million last year — a 9 percent raise — as tougher competition and higher labor costs whittled profits at the Atlanta-based oilfield-services company.
Chief Executive Richard A. Hubbell was paid $2.2 million in salary and bonus, $876,750 in stock awards and $32,329 in perks, pension and other job benefits, the company disclosed in a proxy statement filed Monday.
RPC, which is controlled by Atlanta’s Rollins family, also gave its chairman, R. Randall Rollins, a raise of nearly 10 percent last year, to $2.9 million, the company said.
Rollins Inc., the pest control firm founded by the Rollins family, spun off RPC as a separate company in 1984. Last year, RPC earned $274 million, down 7 percent from its 2011 income of $296 million.
Although the Rollins family controls roughly two-thirds of RPC’s shares, mutual funds and other large investors also hold substantial stakes, including Vanguard, Blackrock and Atlanta-based Herndon Capital Management.
Meanwhile, Atlanta-based EarthLink disclosed last week that it trimmed the pay of its CEO, Rolla P. Huff, to $4 million, down about $40,000. Huff’s 2012 pay included $1.5 million in salary and bonus, $2.5 million in stock and stock option awards, and $26,072 in perks.
The biggest decline Huff saw in his pay was due to a nearly $260,000 drop in “dividend-like payments” on his stock awards, compared to 2011, according to the proxy. Other parts of his pay increased about $220,000.
EarthLink, an independent Internet service provider, has gone through ups and downs over the years as it has migrated to providing primarily data and voice services to business customers rather than linking individual customers to the Internet.
Last year, EarthLink reported $7.5 million in profits, down almost 80 percent from 2011 and a small fraction of its $287 million net income in 2009.
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