The boss of the world’s biggest automaker, Toyota, saw his pay packet swell by a third last year, filings showed yesterday, but to a level that sees him still earning only a fraction of his overseas counterparts.
The Japanese auto giant paid its chief Akio Toyoda a total of ¥184 million (US$1.86 million) in salary and bonuses, according to a filing from Japan’s Financial Services Agency yesterday. Toyoda’s remuneration also includes dividends from shares he owns in the company.
His salary was up about 35 percent from the previous 12 months after overseeing a tripling of net profit in the latest fiscal year to March, to ¥962.1 billion. Toyota shares rose by about one-third over the same period.
Photo: EPA
Carlos Ghosn, head of rival Nissan, Japan’s No. 2 automaker, retained his ranking as possibly Japan’s best-paid CEO, raking in ¥988 million in the fiscal year to March. That was a modest 0.1 percent rise from a year earlier, shareholders were told at the company’s annual meeting yesterday. Investors voted to keep him on for another two-year term.
“Companies must employ and retain top leaders,” Ghosn told investors last year in response to questions on his pay package.
Ghosn has been credited with rescuing Nissan from the brink of bankruptcy, frequently cited as the reason for his above-average pay.
However, even his handsome package was overshadowed by his counterparts in the US where Ford chief executive Alan Mulally was paid US$21 million last year, while General Motors’ chief Dan Akerson received US$11.1 million, US media has reported.
Pay packages for Japanese executives — and the salary gap between a firm’s lowest and highest-paid workers — tends to be a fraction of levels seen in North America and Europe, where top pay has attracted growing criticism.
In April, shareholders in Swiss private bank Julius Baer rejected the bank’s plan for executive compensation in a non-binding vote, amid outrage over huge pay packages.
That came just a month after Swiss voters massively came out in favor of a new law limiting executive pay and bonuses, among various measures taken across Europe to shrink CEO pay.
Also, earlier this year, a government auditor blasted the US Treasury for approving high levels of top-level pay at firms bailed out in the financial crisis.
In Japan, CEO compensation of around US$1 million or less is not uncommon while some executives take pay or bonus cuts if the firm has not performed. Last month, Sony said dozens of senior executives would give up their bonuses this year to atone for a slump in its embattled electronics unit.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts