Another stock windfall for staff at top ASX performer DroneShield

More than 70 DroneShield employees are being showered with another windfall, poised to rake in $41 million of free shares as lucrative revenue-linked stock rewards keep delivering.

Staff and directors of the counter-drone company have already given tens of millions in shares under a now contentious 2023 performance plan that provided for the vesting and exercise of up to 44.5 million options on DroneShield hitting $200m of revenue in a 12-month period.

The lion’s share of the options — 44.88m — have already been converted into new shares, with chief executive Oleg Vornik, chair Peter James and another director controversially almost immediately selling all of the shares from their allocation without warning in a $70m share dump in early November.

Late on Friday, after the close of ASX trading, DroneShield disclosed the vesting of a further 9.22m performance options tied to the $200m revenue milestone, including 709,361 held by Mr Vornik. Another 71 option holders also benefitted, for a potential average gain of $130,500 each.

On the exercise of the scrip, which is worth $40.2m based on DroneShield’s closing share price of $4.47 on Friday, just 9m options from the 2023 staff rewards scheme will remain unvested or unexercised.

Now worth about $4 billion, DroneShield was the S&P-ASX200’s best performer in 2025, even allowing for the hit that followed the investor furore around the board sales.

Within days of exercising the $200m-revenue performance options, Mr Vornik sold his entire holding of DroneShield shares for $49.5m between November 6 and November 12 last year. Mr James and Mr Marks also offloaded all of their ordinary shares during the same period, realising $12.3m and $4.9m respectively.

The unexplained sales stunned investors and undermined confidence in the Sydney-based company.

The stock lost half of its value, plumbing $1.75 before recovering at the end of the year.

It took two weeks for Mr Vornik to publicly address the sales, the CEO reiterating his “unwavering commitment” to DroneShield, which makes AI platforms to ward off attacks by drones, and insisting the “the fundamental business of DroneShield remains strong and unchanged”.

However, the company acknowledged that its “level of stakeholder engagement may not have met expectations”.

DroneShield has since moved to establish a mandatory minimum shareholding policy for all directors and senior management in the wake of an independent review of its continuous disclosure and securities trading policies.

It has also assured investors that future performance options would vest in three equal tranches — once the company meets $300m in annual revenue, then at the $400m and $500m milestones.

DroneShield’s noted in Friday’s disclosure that the share options had been expense in its accounts as a non-cash item totalling $23.5m.

“The significant expense is due to performance options granted over several annual performance periods, crystallising in a short amount of time, due to the rapid growth of the business,” it said.