[caption id="attachment_2949" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Photo by Nieve44/La Lu"][/caption]
Needless to say, if the management team is paying themselves too well, pls avoid the company. Most annual reports of Singapore co.s these days have a section on management payout. I make it a point to find out how much they are paid.
Just some rough no.s (since I can’t really remember all the figures), the CEO pay package is usually about $1mn for a few hundred million revenue firm. For smaller co.s, it is about $500k or so. Of course, as we all know, the record is a whopping S$20mn.
What is a good sum to pay a CEO? And how to actually determine the formula for the payout? Well I don’t have a good answer, but what I do think is wrong is to base it off revenue. Bcos a firm could have high revenue but zero profits to shareholders. It is also wrong for it to be mechanical, like based on formulas. So maybe a basic package and then bonus to be based off a comination of factors like net profit growth, impact of past decisions and qualitative appraisal by stakeholders of the firm.
Well there is also the social pay scale to consider, in our crazy world where a 23 yr old analyst could be paid S$100k a year, surely we cannot expect CEOs to be paid like S$150k a year right? So actually there is a floor for CEO’s pay. Since senior managers in big firms get around $200-300k so it is not unusual for CEOs to be getting around $500k at least. Read more...