Seattle: Amazon.com Inc did not grant its Chief Executive Andy Jassy any new stock in 2022, shrinking the pay gap between the online retailer’s top boss and rank-and-file employees, the company said Thursday in a securities filing.
At the same time, it awarded more than $40 million each to the recently elevated CEOs of its e-commerce and cloud businesses, at 2022 share prices, and Jassy took home a similar amount from his own earlier grants, the filing showed.
Amazon for months has grappled with inflation and recession fears that prompted its customers to tighten their budgets. Aiming to slash costs, the company said it would cut 27,000 jobs and trim some stock awards.
The pay ratio of its median employee globally to Jassy was 1 to 38 in 2022, or about $34,000 compared with the CEO’s $1.3 million worth of salary and benefits. The year prior, the ratio was 1 to 6,474, reflecting a stock grant Amazon said would take Jassy a decade to earn fully.
Union officials and U.S. politicians have long criticized CEOs’ outsized compensation relative to staff, including at Amazon, where the majority of its 1.5 million-person workforce labor in and around warehouses. In the United States, its median full-time pay was $41,762, Amazon said.
The company said in the filing that Jassy’s 2021 award, originally worth $214 million, was “intended to represent most of his compensation for the coming years”, a reason why it had no plans to bestow more stock in 2023 or last year.
The package has declined sharply since Amazon awarded it. Reflecting the company’s stock drop, Jassy’s award along with older grants lost nearly $148 million of their value in 2022.
Still, he took home $31.9 million from those older grants that vested last year, the filing said.
(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in Palo Alto, Calif.; Editing by Sonali Paul)
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