Compensation for Coca-Cola’s top five executives last year ranged from $4.5 million to the $24.7 million paid to James Quincey, chairman and chief executive officer of the iconic, Atlanta-based company, according to the company’s annual proxy statement.
Quincey, who has been with the company since 1996, has been CEO since 2017 and chairman of the board since 2019. His compensation, like other top executives,’ came in a combination of base pay, supplemented by stock awards, option awards, incentive pay and contributions to pension plans.
Quincey received $1.6 million in base pay.
The other executives whose compensation was listed in the proxy include:
- John Murphy, the company’s president and CFO, who received $11.1 million, including $1.1 million in base pay.
- Manuel Arroyo, Coca-Cola’s executive vice president and global chief marketing officer, who was paid $6.7 million, including $689,585 in base pay.
- Henrique Braun, executive vice president and president of international development, who was paid $6.9 million, including $700,000 in base pay.
- Jennifer Mann, executive vice president and president of the North American operating unit, who received $4.5 million, including $695,250 in base pay.
The company reported net revenues last year of $45.8 billion and net income of $10.7 billion.
Compensation is set by the company’s Talent and Compensation Committee, which consists of four members of the Coca-Cola board of directors: Helene Gayle, Carolyn Everson, Alexis Herman and Maria Elena Lagomasino. None is or has been an employee or officer of Coca-Cola, the company said.
In the proxy, the committee said compensation was set after considering a “comparator group” of other large, publicly traded companies, some of them also in the food and beverage business, like McDonald’s, Kraft Heinz, Procter & Gamble and Starbucks, but also some with little or no overlap to Coca-Cola’s business, like Abbott Laboratories, Archer-Daniels-Midland Company and Intel Corp.
A sampling of available data indicated that the compensation for Coca-Cola’s CEO ranks fairly high among the executives of that group.
A group that monitors — and criticizes — executive pay last year placed Quincey number 59th on the list of “the 100 most overpaid CEOs.” That was only three slots above PepsiCo’s CEO, Ramon Laguarta. From the comparator group, only Nike’s CEO ranked higher, coming in at 18th with compensation of $28.8 million.
Coca-Cola’s compensation committee wrote in the proxy that it did not intend to copy other companies. “This comparator group is used as a reference point, but compensation paid at other companies is only one factor in the decision-making process,” the committee wrote.
In 2022, American CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
U.S. securities regulations now require that companies calculate the ratio between CEO pay and the compensation for the median paycheck of an employee. The Coca-Cola compensation committee wrote in the proxy that company’s median employee was “a part-time, hourly barista employed in the United Kingdom by Costa Limited,” which is a Coca-Cola subsidiary.
That median employee was paid $13,752 last year, the committee wrote. “Based on this information, for 2023, the ratio of the compensation of the CEO to the median annual total compensation of all other employees was estimated to be 1,799 to 1.”
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