GSK could double its long-serving CEO Emma Walmsley’s pay packet to £21.6 million ($27.2 million) after admitting its boss's current pay didn’t reward her performance and would put off future candidates from becoming Walmsley’s successor.
The British pharma giant released a remuneration plan this week that could make Walmsley one of the FTSE100’s highest-paid CEOs, provided she can help GSK’s share price soar and oversee a host of successful new drug rollouts.
According to GSK’s 2024 remuneration report, Walmsley was paid £10.6 million ($13.3 million) in 2024. Under the remuneration committee’s proposals, Walmsley’s total pay package could reach up to eight times her base salary.
The remuneration committee’s proposal will go before shareholders in May.
“The CEO’s current package, which is currently in the lower quartile of the new size-adjusted global biopharma peer group, is insufficient either to reward her performance, or to provide the appropriate capacity for succession,” Wendy Becker, the chair of GSK’s remuneration committee, wrote in the report.
As is regular practice, Walmsley’s pay will only hit that magic $27 million figure if a number of performance targets are hit over the next three years. Only 16% of Walmsley’s 2024 pay was attributable to her base salary.
Walmsley, who has headed up GSK since 2017, will be set the task of increasing GSK’s share price by 50% and helping the group launch several drugs.
If Walmsley hits those targets, she would be paid more than Pascal Soriot, the boss of GSK’s close competitor AstraZeneca and the highest-paid CEO on the FTSE100. In its remuneration report, the committee said that because of GSK’s operations, it was not appropriate to compare Walmsley’s salary with the rest of the British stock index.
The group is also the benchmark against which it judges CEO compensation to only include pharmaceutical groups, having previously included retailers like Adidas and Unilever.
“The proposed changes to our executive remuneration policy further strengthen the link between management and shareholder interests, with higher rewards contingent on industry-leading R&D progress and shareholder returns,” a spokesperson for GSK told Fortune.
The U.K.’s biggest companies have been on a mission to hike the salaries of their CEOs amid fears they could lose out on the best talent.
Last year, AstraZeneca proposed a pay packet that could reach up to £25.2 million ($31.2 million) for its CEO Pascal Soriot, with some investors arguing he was being “massively underpaid”.
Soriot’s proposed remuneration plan passed despite significant opposition from shareholders, a third of whom rejected the proposal.
