Chief executives at the U.K.'s largest drug companies, GlaxoSmithKline PLC and AstraZeneca PLC, were rewarded with double-digit pay rises in 2019 after an increasing focus on novel cancer medicines — accompanied by a rising share price — paid off.
 GSK CEO Emma Walmsley Source: GSK |
Emma Walmsley, CEO of Brentford, London-based GSK, received a 42% increase, bringing her total compensation package to £8.36 million in 2019, compared with £5.9 million in 2018. This brings Walmsley, who has restructured GSK and multiplied the number of experimental medicines in development to about 60 in just under three years, above the compensation attained by former CEO Andrew Witty, who was paid £6.8 million in 2016. GSK now has 17 assets under development in oncology alone, compared with just one that was left following a 2015 asset swap with Novartis AG.
Walmsley was awarded the second of two 8% salary increases beginning Jan. 1, intended to make up for a lower starting salary that was established citing a lack of CEO experience when she took over the job after running the group's consumer division. Still, GSK concedes that Walmsley's total compensation remains below the lower median when compared with her peers in a group of global pharmaceutical companies. Hal Barron, head of research at GSK, received $6.33 million, slightly lower than the $6.6 million he was compensated in 2018.
AstraZeneca awarded CEO Pascal Soriot a 25% increase in total compensation to £14.3 million, up from £11.4 million in 2018 after the Cambridge, England-based drugmaker returned to growth that year. The company has sold off older drugs and plowed the proceeds back into R&D, notably in cancer with Imfinzi, Tagrisso and Lynparza. For AstraZeneca, which has the second-highest number of drugs in development in the industry after Switzerland's Roche Holding AG, China forms the cornerstone of the company's pledge to attain sales of $45 billion by 2023.
Novartis' CEO Vas Narasimhan saw his total compensation rise by 59% to CHF10.61 million, or £8.7 million, in 2019, a year in which the Basel, Switzerland-based group invested nearly $41 billion on acquisitions, most recently spending $9.7 billion on The Medicines Co. to gain a foothold in ribonucleic acid interference, or RNAi.
Narasimhan, who previously headed R&D at Novartis, offered up about $400,000 of his bonus after data manipulation was uncovered at Avexis, a gene therapy company the Swiss giant acquired in 2018. The CEO spent $15 billion in his first year in the role, moving Novartis into new technologies such as cell and gene therapy and nuclear medicine in a bid to expand the company's R&D matrix beyond previously established platforms.
