Samsung Pays Top Execs Most in S. Korea
By wchung | 18 Jun, 2026

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.