Vesting

Vesting is the process by which an equity award’s conditions — continued service, performance goals, or both — are satisfied, converting a conditional promise of shares into shares the recipient actually owns outright. Before vesting, an award can typically be forfeited if the executive departs; after vesting, it cannot.

A typical multi-year grant vests on a schedule rather than all at once — for example, in equal annual installments over three or four years — so at any given time an executive is likely to be holding a mix of already-vested shares and still-unvested awards from grants made in different years.

An unvested award’s value is generally reported at the current stock price, which is why the same number of unvested units is worth a different dollar figure from one proxy to the next even when nothing about the grant itself has changed — only the stock price behind it has moved.

Mark Casper still holds 1,467 unvested Marvell restricted stock units, worth $99,067 at the price the proxy uses — value neither realized nor forfeited until the vesting date arrives.