Accountability is now part of the executive pay packet and there’s nowhere to hide if you can’t justify that salary. Brett Clegg compares CEO remuneration with the bottom line
SETTING EXECUTIVE salaries has always tended to be more art than science, but there is new pressure on corporates to link pay more closely with performance. The backlash from fund managers and shareholders against the remuneration deals conjured up by some of our biggest companies has provided a very different context to our annual look at salaries.
In a bid to see how the numbers run, we chose 25 CEOs from leading Australian companies and checked their 2002-03 deals against company performance. These are not the highest paid individuals – just a cross section of well-paid bosses from a range of sectors.
The results, mapped over these six pages, are interesting: some of the most highly paid senior executives presided over some of the biggest declines in shareholder value. It’s clearly not a good look, at least in the short term. But for other CEOs, the value – or lack of value – achieved was far more complex.
For example, how much is a 20 per cent growth in earnings per share worth? Two million dollars? Three million dollars? And does total shareholder return of only 4 per cent matter when the market as a whole dropped 2 per cent? In short, it’s one thing to compare one CEO’s performance against the next, it’s far harder to assess a CEO in absolute terms or against the rest of the workforce.
The salaries in our “million dollar club” range from just above $1 million to more than $6 million. Back in 1984, Australian Business magazine looked at Australia’s highest-paid executives and found then Elders IXL boss John Elliott was on top on a package of $350,000 a year, which translates to about $900,000 in today’s dollars.
Research commissioned by the Labor Council of NSW concluded that executive remuneration levels in Australia ballooned from 22 times to 74 times average weekly earnings over the decade to 2002. Driving the increase was a combination of factors, including pay rates being dragged into line with global equivalents as Australian companies became increasingly international in outlook.