Qantas boss Alan Joyce has flown close to the top of the Australian executive pay league after nearly doubling his remuneration in the past financial year.
Joyce earned a total pay package of $24.6m in the 2016-17 year, the company’s annual report showed on Friday, nearly twice as much as the $12.96m he pocketed in the previous 12 months.
Joyce’s huge pay bump reflected a big rise in the company’s share price in the past financial year, the report said, which drove a big increase in the value of his performance-based incentives to $18.5m from $3.16m.
His base pay was frozen at $2.1m, while his cash bonus was less than the previous year’s at almost $1.8m, thanks to slightly lower company profits. The balance of the package included nearly $2m in short-term incentives.
Leigh Clifford, the company’s chairman, defended the pay award which he said was based on the airline’s “remarkable” turnaround from a $2.8bn loss in 2014 to record profits.
“There is no question that these pay outcomes are high,” Clifford said in a statement.
“That’s because they reflect the company’s exceptional performance, including our top ranking for total shareholder return among global airline peers and every company on the ASX100.”
Clifford said the share price had more than quadrupled in the past three years and the value of executive bonuses, which are mostly paid in Qantas shares, had risen accordingly.
Shares that were worth $1.26 when they were awarded in 2014 as part of a three-year-long term incentive plan are now being paid out at $5.72.
Three years ago Qantas made a loss of $2.84bn thanks to a bruising battle with Virgin and oil prices well over $100 a barrel.
But painful restructuring involving thousands of redundancies and a halving of the price of fuel has seen the carrier transformed, recording its second-highest profit ever in the 2016-17 year.
Joyce, who will now vie with the Lowy brothers at Westfield and Macquarie boss Nicholas Moore to be the highest paid executive in a public company, said the restructuring had “certainly paid off”.
