Who’s Who: Top ten earning FTSE 100 CEOs take home £89.5m
A new report has revealed that the top ten earning FTSE 100 CEOs took home £89.5m between them in 2020.
Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, topped the list taking home a healthy paycheck of £15.45m. The report, published by the High Pay Centre, noted that Soriot’s earnings were well above the average pay for FTSE 100 CEOs which stood at £2.69m in 2020.
AstraZeneca gave no comment on the results with a spokesperson noting that CEO pay is based on company performance. AstraZeneca published record financials in 2020, taking home $26.6bn (£19.42bn) in revenue and issuing $3.6bn in dividend payments at $2.80 per share.
Experian’s Brian Cassin was the second highest earning FTSE 100 CEO, taking home £10.3m in 2020. The company took in revenue of $5.2bn for the year and returned $613m to shareholders as dividend payments.
Peter Jackson, the CEO of Flutter, came in seventh place with earnings of £7.52m making him the only top ten earner to take home more in 2020 than 2019 when he was paid £2.1m. The report noted that FTSE 100 CEOs saw average pay decrease by 17 per cent last year, down from £3.25m in 2019.
Emma Walmsley, the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, came in ninth place and was the only woman to make the top ten with a salary of £7.03m. Walmsley is one of just seven female FTSE 100 CEOs and rewarded shareholders with dividends of 80p per share as free cash flow topped £5.4m for the year.
In third and fourth place, Albert Manifold, the CEO of CRH and Laxman Narasimhan of Reckitt Benckiser both took home more than £9m each. The CEOs of Berkeley and Anglo American also made the list with Tim Steiner, the CEO of Ocado ranking in tenth place with a paycheck of £6.97m.
While the pay of top earners took a hit during the pandemic year, the average FTSE 100 CEO still took home 86 times more than the median earnings of a full-time UK worker in 2020.