SiliconBeat

Shares of Accuray plunged Friday, a day after the company said it would miss its deadline for filing financial results for its fiscal 2009 first quarter because the company was “further reviewing financial results” in response to allegations by a former employee of possible improprieties in handling and accounting for certain inventory items”.

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Accuray, the Sunnyvale developer of robotic radiosurgery systems says that it will install its first CyberKnife system in the Middle East at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Logo to the left.)

The medical equipment, to be used by the newly established King Faisal Cancer Centre, Read the rest of this entry »

Accuray, the Sunnyvale developer of robotic surgery tools, filed its proxy Tuesday in advance of its first shareholder meeting since going public last February.

Its top officers were each awarded a 20 percent raise for fiscal 2008. For chief executive
Euan Thomson that means an extra $84,000 a year, or about $1,600 a week, bringing the salary portion of his compensation to $504,000. The company’s chief operating officer, Chris Raanes, received a $58,000 bump in pay to $348,000, while its chief financial officer, Robert McNamara, got a $55,000 boost, bringing his salary to $330,000.

Accuray also pays its executives cash bonuses and stock-based compensation. For Thomson, those items added $2 million to the value of his pay.

The compensation committee for the board of directors said the raises were necessary to bring the executives’ “base salaries in line with our compensation philosophy of paying base salaries at the 60th percentile of our appropriate marketplace.”

So what is that “appropriate marketplace”? The committee evaluated compensation data for “comparable companies from the Radford select list. This list includes publicly held technology and life sciences companies with annual revenue ranging from $250 to $449 million.”

Although Accuray’s revenue more than doubled in fiscal 2007, it totaled $140.5 million, or about 78 percent less than the lowest level in the range used for comparison.

Accuray ended the year in the red, but its net loss shrank to $5.6 million from $33.7 million the year before. However, the amount of cash it generated from operations fell nearly in half to $11.6 million, from $22.1 million the year before.

There were other interesting tidbits from the proxy, particularly these that raise corporate governance red flags:

•    The company is asking shareholders to approve a stock incentive plan containing 4.5 million shares. Details of the plan include an evergreen clause that will automatically increase the number of shares in the plan at the beginning of each new fiscal year.
•   The company also has no policy to seek the reimbursement of cash hire bonus awards or relocation amounts paid to an executive if he or she voluntarily terminates his or her employment.
•   The company has no stock ownership guidelines in place requiring stock ownership on the part of its executive officers.