SiliconBeat

The compensation committee of Echelon’s board of directors has decided to “forgo specific financial or operating performance requirements” under its management bonus plan this year, “given the current uncertain economic environment.”

Instead, all its named officers will need to do to receive their bonuses, which are to be paid out in shares of company stock, is to Read the rest of this entry »

The board at Echelon, the San Jose appliance networking company, voted to change the way it pays for Chief Executive Ken Oshman’s travel on his personal jet, according to a filing the company made with the SEC Tuesday.

Had the new arrangement been in place since the beginning of the year, Read the rest of this entry »

Echelon President and Chief Operating Officer Bea Yormark passed away this weekend from complication related to a cerebral hemorrhage, the company announced today. She was 63 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote a story in today’s Mercury News looking at the big change in fortune at Echelon, the San Jose appliance networking company, and how CEO Ken Oshman’s decision to stick it out for two decades may be about to pay off. You can read the whole thing here. And if that leaves you begging for more, you can listen to the podcast that I did to go with it.

But one subject I didn’t touch on in the story was stock sales. With Echelon’s stock price up about 200 percent this year, it’s not surprising that more insiders are selling more stock. In 2007, insiders have sold $5.9 million worth of stock, compared to Zero in 2006, and $494,411 in 2005.

But here’s something that is surprising, nay, downright shocking: Oshman has never sold a single share of stock in almost two decades of running the company. He still holds 6,050,183 shares, or 15.1 percent. Oshman is financially secure from his previous gig, running ROLM, a telecom company that IBM bought in 1984. Still, it’s amazing.

Since the company went public in 1998, insiders have sold $44.6 million worth of stock, hardly a bonanza by Valley standards. The big winners include Motorola, an early investor, which sold about $13 million worth of stock early on.

As far as insiders go, Beatrice Yormark, chief operating officer, has sold $4.9 million worth of stock. And Oliver Stanfield, chief financial officer, has sold $6.6 million. Yormark has been at Echelon since 1990, while Stanfield has been there over a decade.