Paying for performance

SINGAPORE (May 7): It is that time of the year again when companies with December year-ends release their annual reports and hold their AGMs. While most investors will already have a good sense of how well these companies performed during the year from their quarterly and half-yearly financial reports, the annual reports also contain varying degrees of information on how much these companies paid their top executives.

Size and profitability count for a lot. The highest-paid executives are often the bosses of Singapore’s banks and largest property developers. And, every now and then, the CEO of a mid-sized company that had an exceptionally good year makes headlines for his pay package. Case in point: Wong Ngit Liong, chairman and CEO of Venture Corp, was paid a total of $12 million for FY2017. That was more than the $10.3 million that DBS Group Holdings’ CEO Piyush Gupta took home.

Most investors would not begrudge Wong the money, though. For its FY2017 ended Dec 31, Venture reported a 39.9% y-o-y rise in revenue to $4 billion, and a 106.3% y-o-y rise in earnings to $372.8 million. The company declared total dividends of 60 cents a share for FY2017, up from 50 cents in FY2016. Over the course of 2017, Venture saw a 107.2% rally in its share price, versus a 17.7% rise in the Straits Times Index. (The stock has since suffered a big sell-off recently on concerns about the sustainability of its earnings growth momentum.)

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