Samsung Pays Top Execs Most in S. Korea

Samsung Electronics pays its executive board members more than any of the other 1,000 listed Korean companies with an average annual compensation of 10.9 billion won ($9.4 mil.), according to a survey by the Korea CXO Research Institute published Monday.

Compensation includes salary, benefits, performance bonuses and long-term incentives like stock options. The executive boards typically comprise C-level executives like the CEO, COO, CMO, CTO, CFO and CIO.

SK Innovation was a distant second with average executive board compensation of 4.6 billion won ($4.0 mil.), followed by Samsung SDI with 3.5 billion won ($3.0 mil.).

The next four were all SK Group subsidiaries — SK Telecom at 3.47 billion won (2.98 mil.), SK Corp. at 3.31 billion won ($2.8 mil.) and SK C&C at 3.28 billion won ($2.8 mil.).

In seventh place was CJ Cheiljedang, the core unit of CJ Group with an average top executive salary of 2.89 billion won ($2.5 mil.). CJ Cheiljedang is the only food manufacturer to rank among the top 10 in executive compensation.

Taken as a whole, the average wage of executive board members of the 1,000 listed Korean corporations was 376.7 million won ($323,700) in 2011, up 23.8% from 2010.

By comparison the total 2011 compensation of GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt was $21.6 mil., IBM CEO Sam Palmisano was $31.8 million, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was $43 mil., Abbott Laboratories CEO Miles White was $24 mil.