Alan Joyce will forgo any bonus or pay rise this year, the Qantas CEO has said days before he is expected to announce the airline’s first annual loss.
Joyce will earn his base pay of $2.3 million but will give up the bonuses that last year brought his compensation to roughly $5 million. He joins a list of other high-profile Australian executives, including the heads of mining giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, who have bowed to pressure from investors amid poor performance.
“It’s absolutely appropriate that when company returns go down, executive pay should go down as well,” Joyce told The Australian Financial Review. “It’s been an extremely tough year for Qantas shareholders and what we want to show is that my pay has to have a huge correlation with the profitability of the company.”
Qantas is expected to announce a statutory loss of about $200 million when it reveals its results for the last financial year on Thursday. In a statement to the stock market in June, the airline said it expected an underlying profit before tax of between $50-100 million, down from $552 million the previous year.
The statutory loss would be Qantas’s first since it was privatised in 1995.
Joyce has pushed forward an aggressive ‘transformation’ effort, cutting services on Qantas’s loss-making international routes and consolidating its maintenance, engineering and catering operations in moves that have cost some 2,800 Qantas workers their jobs.
