The Zalando boss received 89 million euros in remuneration in his last year.
(Photo: imago images/STPP)
Munich The probably best-paid boss of a Dax company in 2021 has been a private individual since June. Rubin Ritter received compensation of 89 million euros in his last year at Zalando, according to the annual report. The lion’s share of this relates to stock options that Ritter received in 2011, 2013 and 2014 – for the most part before Zalando went public. Even before his resignation, he exercised options worth 42.5 million euros, and then another for 46.6 million. The co-CEOs Robert Gentz and David Schneider – the founders of Zalando – each came to 45.5 million euros thanks to the 2021 option programs.
Ritter announced his retirement in December 2020 to give his wife – a judge – the opportunity to pursue a better career. According to his Linkedin profile, he is on maternity leave. He brought the start-up company from Berlin to the stock exchange in 2014. Today, Zalando is worth more than twelve billion euros and has been one of 40 DAX companies since the leading index was increased. As early as 2020, Ritter received remuneration of 53.3 million euros through the exercise of a stock option program.
Zalando emphasized in the annual report that the options were granted for services in the years 2011 to 2017 when the company was “at an early stage of development”. The company was never deprived of money as a result, the shares came from the conditional capital. Last year, Zalando introduced an upper limit for the remuneration of the CEOs of 15.75 million euros, for normal board members it is 10.5 million.
Former start-ups that became successful on the stock market have been among the German companies with the highest executive salaries for several years – thanks to the stock bonuses that they had accumulated over the years. In 2020, the head of the delivery service Delivery Hero, Niklas Östberg, was one of the top earners in the Dax with a total remuneration of 45.7 million euros. The remuneration report for 2021 is not yet available. The head of the software provider Teamviewer, Oliver Steil, even received 71 million euros the year before last. However, as of this year, new rules for the disclosure of Management Board salaries have made their comparability significantly more difficult.
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