The amount Korean CEOs earn compared to their company’s average worker is staggering.
While it is expected that a company’s CEO would bring home a lot more money than the lower ranked employees, recent findings have revealed that CEOs at Korean companies make on average 22 times the average worker’s salary.
The biggest differences in CEO-to-Employee wage came, unsurprisingly, from Korea’s largest company Samsung Electronics, whose Vice Chairman Kwon Oh Hyun made ₩6.69 billion KRW ($5.86 million), 62 times more than the average employee at the company’s average wage of ₩107 million KRW ($95,000) per year.
For other large companies, this gap was similar. Samsung Biologics saw their CEO Kim Tae Han made almost 54 times the average employee while the CEO of LG Household & Health Care earned around 50 times the average employee’s salary.
Most Korean companies have a smaller gap though, as shown by LG Display and SK Innovation. While both are also massive corporations in their own right, their CEO’s only have a difference in pay between 20 and 30 times the average worker.
While Korean CEOs certainly dwarf their workers in the amount they take home every year, this difference is nothing compared to western companies. The average CEO in the United States brings home more than 300 times the amount of their employee’s salary. This difference in pay is almost 6 times larger than even the biggest wage gap of any Korean company.
Source: The Investor and Fortune
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