Japanese Presidents of listed companies usually receive remuneration around 10-20 times the average salary of other employees of their company – in contrast to US or UK top listed companies, where the multiples are more like >300 in the case of the US and >180 in the case of the UK.
So it’s no surprise that in order to attract non-Japanese directors, Japanese companies are having to fork out above the average sums. According to Tokyo Shoko Research, 7 of the top 10 best paid directors are non-Japanese and around 20% of the top 100 best paid directors are non-Japanese.
Top earner by far in 2015/6 was Softbank‘s recently departed Nikesh Arora on Y6478m (around $65m or £50m).
Others were
2. Joseph Michael DePinto of chainstore 7-Eleven $21m
3. Ronald Fisher of Softbank $20m
4. Michiyoshi Ohnishi of Aoi Electronics $11m
5. Carlos Ghosn Nissan $10m
6. Kazuo Okada Universal Entertainment (gaming and casinos) $9.5m
7. Christophe Weber, Takeda $9m
8. John Domme, Hitachi $9m
9. Kohji Tanabe, U-Shin (access mechanisms for vehicles) $8.8m
10. Ralph Alavarez Skylark restaurant chain $8.6m
Other Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe:
11. Kazuo Hirai of Sony $7.9m
15. Didier Leroy of Toyota $7m
21. Tim Andree of Dentsu $4.8m
27. Yasuchika Hasegawa of Takeda $4.5m
29. Fujitaka Komori of Fujifilm $4.4m
30. Andrew Plump, Takeda $4.2m
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