BERLIN, June 11 (Xinhua) -- As in the previous year, the salaries of Germany's DAX 30 executives were 52 times higher than their employees' in 2018, according to the annual executive pay study by Germany's leading association for private investors (DSW) published on Tuesday.
On average, executive compensation at Germany's DAX 30 companies fell by 3.5 percent last year, according to the study conducted in cooperation with the department of controlling at the Technical University of Munich.
As a result, the remuneration of Germany's top managers was developing in a different direction from gross wages and salaries in Germany overall where wages grew by 3.1 percent over the same period, Marc Tuengler, DSW Managing Director said.
As in the previous year, the top earner among the CEOs in the DAX was Bill McDermott of German software developer SAP, with a total remuneration of 10.8 million euros (12.2 million U.S. dollars). SAP currently is the most valuable company in the German DAX by market capitalization.
Herbert Diess, CEO of Germany's largest car producer Volkswagen, came second again with 7.9 million euros. Bernd Scheifele of Heidelberg Cement was third for the first time with 7.3 million euros.
In Germany, executive board members usually receive a remuneration package based on three components -- a fixed remuneration, a variable part and share-price-based variable.
According to the study, there is a strong shift towards share price-based compensation which increased by 10.2 percent and now accounted for 30.4 percent of total compensation of executives in Germany.
"The shift towards more share-price-oriented compensation is also going in the right direction," commented Gunther Friedl from the Chair of Controlling at Technical University of Munich.
This year, Volkswagen is the front-runner in terms of remuneration at Germany's 30 largest companies listed in the DAX. At an average of 6.0 million euros per executive board member, compensation was even higher than at German chemical giant Merck, coming in at second place.
To the surprise of the study's authors, Deutsche Bank ranked third among the top earners. In 2018, a member of the Board of Management earned an average of 5.1 million euros there.
The highest earners of any German company were not found at one of Germany's largest 30 DAX companies but at the fashion mail-order company Zalando. With Robert Genz, David Schneider and Rubin Ritter, the company has three CEOs with equal rights, each of whom was granted a sum of almost 19.4 million euros for their work in the past fiscal year.
