The CEOs of the largest publicly traded companies in Germany According to a study, they are paid below average compared to their colleagues abroad. The bosses of the 40 Dax companies were granted an average total remuneration of 5.13 million euros last year, according to an evaluation published on Monday by the Technical University of Munich for the DSW shareholder association. In the French blue-chip index CAC40, it was just as much more with 6.47 million euros as in the Swiss SMI with 7.11 million euros.
Germany must “make sure that against the background of the extreme salaries abroad, you can continue to find the right candidates for the management of the company in international competition,” warned Marc Tüngler, general manager of the German Protection Association for Securities Ownership (DSW). On the other hand, one has to take into account that the liability risk for German CEOs is “rather reduced”.
Top managers in the US get five times as much
The USA play in a completely different league: While no Dax CEO earned more than ten million euros in Germany in 2022, no top manager was below that in the American Dow Jones index. In the Switzerland the heads of UBS, Roche and Novartis earned the equivalent of more than ten million euros. In the USA, the CEOs received an average of 24.9 million euros.
With the equivalent of 94.5 million euros remained Apple-Chef Tim Cook (62) as a top earner just below the sound barrier of 100 million dollars. The front runner of 2021, intelboss Pat Gelsinger (62), ended up at the bottom of the ranking this time with almost 10.8 million euros. In Europe he would still be in eighth place. Salaries in the USA fluctuate much more: only a twelfth of the total remuneration is fixed with them, according to the study it is almost a third in the Dax.
Salaries of German Dax board members are falling on average
The German top earner, Deutsche Bank boss Christian Sewing (53), ranks only 18th in Europe with 9.2 million euros. Oliver Blume (55), who next Volkswagen also runs the sports car subsidiary Porsche AG, but with his two chief positions he comes to 9.3 million euros. Merck boss Belen Garijo (63) came in third place according to the data with 8.3 million euros. The ranking is based on the sums that were promised to the board members for their performance in the past year, some of which will only be paid out in a few years.
The supervisory boards have apparently set the bar higher for the board members. Because despite higher sales and profits, the average total remuneration of the Dax board members fell by 8.4 percent, as Professor Gunther Friedl from the Technical University of Munich said. For the current year, he expects slight growth, mainly because share prices are rising, to which the long-term bonuses are partially linked. DSW Managing Director Tüngler, on the other hand, assumes that manager salaries will remain stable at best due to the slowdown in the economy.