posted 04-25-2003 09:45 PM ET (US)        

He expects this trend to abate when Mercury introduces their new high performance 4-stroke outboards, which he predicted will sell at a premium price for some time and will be considered the "Ferrari and Porsches" of the outboard market.

Also affecting the domestic market, said Buckley, was a "flood" of Japanese outboards that were shipped to the U.S. prior to the longshoreman strike on the West Coast last fall.

Also he cited another domestic maker (OMC most liekly) that was selling product at huge discounts.

Improved economic activity and the release of the new 4-stroke engines will help.

Buckley also told investors that Mercury will release the new 75-115 horsepower Optimax engines in May. Their fuel economy is better than 4-strokes. This is important in overseas markets where the price of gas in much higher than domestic. This horsepower range is the fastest growing segment of the outboard market, he said.

Buckley also cited poor weather in the northern United States and a late Easter holiday as affecting sales of marine products in general this quarter.

posted 04-25-2003 10:46 PM ET (US)            

It sounds like the company is being fairly well-run.

If you are interested in the exact compensation for Buckley you need only to look it up in the various SEC filings that are required to disclose this sort of information. With a publicly traded company this is no big secret.

posted 04-26-2003 12:38 PM ET (US)            

I don't recall there being any outboard marine engines produced under that system.

I guess if you want the marketplace to provide you with dozens of makers of outboard marine products that compete in a relatively free and open market, you will also have to accept the fact that the people who work for these companies can earn more money than you think they should.

You ought to begin your own outboard motor manufacturing company, get a few hundred million in capital, and begin development and manufacture of your own outboard motors. You can pay yourself a much lower salary than George Buckley gets--which by the way no one has mentioned what his salary actually is--and then you can sell your outboards at a huge advantage over all those other ones whose CEO's make more.

I don't recall any product being marketed where the salary of the CEO of the company was used as part of the promotion, other than a little hippy-run yuppy ice cream company in Vermont. Their company policy was that the ratio of salary from the highest paid person to the lowest paid person would not exceed 5:1.

They have since abandoned this policy after finding that it was very difficult to find talented executives who would work for them at their salary limitations.

posted 04-26-2003 03:05 PM ET (US)            

I'll but another Whaler but most of us would prefer the option to power it as we want.

posted 04-27-2003 11:42 AM ET (US)            

Personally, I like to see manufacturing jobs remain in the United States. Jobs in manufacturing pay more than most any other category.

Without some manufaturing base to our economy we will soon all be life insurance salesmen or run little dry cleaning and laundry shops.

There is little reason to doubt that manufacturing in North American can be done at the highest levels. The GM plant in Oshawa, Ontario assembles the highest quality automobiles in this hemisphere.

posted 05-02-2003 12:17 PM ET (US)            

Salary: $1,000,000 / year (raised from $800k in June)
Bonus 1: $2,016,300
Bonus 2: $804,700
(two different bonus plans)

Plus a bunch of stock options.

He also beneficialy controls 599,849 shares

Not bad for someone that is running a large company, but not excessive probably average. Stock price has not appreciated much in 2 years but it is not negative either.

posted 05-02-2003 02:50 PM ET (US)            

Of course everyone already knew that, but Jim's comments seem way over simplified.

I don't know if Mr. Buckley is overpaid or not but, I (much like Jack)(and the rest of the country if you look at the stock market), get kind of fed up with some of these CEO packages.

posted 05-02-2003 09:28 PM ET (US)            

And, yes, my scenario was simplistic. Of course, you don't have to own a majority of shares to get the ear of the Board of Directors. I am sure the market value of Brunswicks outstanding shares is in the billions range, so it is unlikely that any of use could acquire enough shares to be taken notice of, unless of course one of us happens to be Kirk Kirkorian.

What I find very strange is the amount of negativity directed toward Buckley personally . I don't recall him doing anything vis-a-vis Whaler specifically that would provoke such vituperative remarks as have been made here.

As for a general distrust of CEO's and corporations, i would say that if Brunswick had just taken 175-billion dollars of equity out of the marine manufacturing stock market segment (which is what ENRON did to the energy trading segment), then there might be cause for a general sense of resentment toward Brunswick, as there now is for ENRON.

posted 05-02-2003 11:06 PM ET (US)         

It's too bad that the folks who are in the process of revamping Chris Craft didn't take over Boston Whaler. The Hunt design firm's influence would have continued, and the classics would have been put back into the main production line for recreational users.

posted 05-06-2003 07:11 PM ET (US)         

Jim tries to start a discussion on Whaler's parent, and you Yamaha owners just trash it. Nice work. I think Jim deserves more respect than that.

What an embarrassment to this website.

Getting back to the original post, with regard to the other engine companies, I believe Buckley was referring to Suzuki, which did indeed dump engines into the US market, for sale at below market pricing, in order to gain market share. This after being a loser in the outboard market for years. They are even painting them black!

The other factor is all of the leftover OMC's being dumped by dealers, for any number of reasons, including lost contracts, discontinued engines, lack of warranties, Ficht technology, etc.

posted 05-06-2003 07:47 PM ET (US)            

How is the salary and struggles of one Mr. Buckley more "on topic / whalerific" than my well thought out, light hearted, helpful (and now deleted) reply to a fellow list member on how to destroy lake side weeds?

Ed

posted 05-06-2003 09:28 PM ET (US)            

I have found that getting information directly from the person in charge is often more reliable than getting it from someone who heard a rumor on another website and is passing it on. If the CEO tells his investment bankers that the company will release a new model of outboard in May, you can darn well bet this is a better source of information than what someone who says a friend told him their dealer told him.

As a matter of fact I was at my Mercury dealer and asked about the new outboards, but they had not heard a thing about them. This is pretty typical. The CEO tells the guys with the big money first, then the message trickles down to the dealers, and then to the dock talk level, and then to the "heard a rumor" level on online forums.

I like to bypass all that nonsense and listen directly to what the CEO says. Now some people seem to think that this is a form of boosterism on my part in favor of Mercury: not so.

Hey, I would be glad to listen to Yamaha's CEO but he lives half a world away and runs a company according to the rules of a totally different nation, and the SEC and its discloures required of publicly traded companies in the USA don't affect him. And, to top if off, they don't have a website where I can just tune in and listen, and if they did they would probably be speaking Japanese. But I doubt that the style of management of a Japanese company would allow so public a disclosure of what it is telling its investment bankers.

However, if there were a reliable source of direct information from the CEO of Yamaha that I could listen to first hand, I would be glad to summarize it and post it here. Then people could could accuse me to being a Yamaha booster.

In a similar fashion, I would be glad to get access to first hand information from the senior management of Bombardier and from Suzuki and Tohatsu and from Nissan, but, again, they don't make this available, or at least I have not found a source for it, so I cannot provide it.

I think really it is a tribute to Brunswick and their company philosophy that they provide this material first hand on the internet and make it so easy to obtain. The other boating companies should learn from this.

Again, the reason I posted this thread is to provide what I think is high information value content about the subject of the website, the Boston Whaler boat, and in this case the company that owns the company that makes the boat we all enjoy hearing about.

Now to respond to ewalsh who appears to be upset that I have removed a thead about limnology and the Georgian Bay eco system--which by the way I announced was off topic and outside the bounds of the forum's focus--I can only explain again my application of the reciprocal principle. I searched several web sites that focus on limnology and control of exotic species introduced into ecosystems, looking for comments about classic Boston Whaler boats made prior to c.1995. I did not find any postings on that topic on any website whose focus was limnology or exotic species. I used this as a guide in deciding that the thread about roaque's weeds was off-topic for this forum.

The question of George Buckley's salary was not introduced by me, nor was the topic of his severance package and other benefits. This material was introduced by others who seem to be unable to cope with the ownership of Boston Whaler by Brunswick, or the selection of Buckley as the CEO by their board of directors.

As I mention above, I should, by all of my own guidelines, delete these comments, but I have not. There have been a few ocassions where authors have posted really over the top comments and I have deleted them. This is more work for me, and in the end it is a benefit to the author who posted the comments. The memory of his rants soon fades and people forget what was said. In some cases I find that I can do myself a favor by leaving ranting and ravings as they were posted. I don't have to spend the time removing them, and as I have often said, you are what you write. In this way people can learn more about the character of the author from his own writings.