Here’s how much the top execs at Coca-Cola took home last year

Compensation for Coca-Cola’s top five executives last year ranged from $4.5 million to the $24.7 million paid to James Quincey, chair and chief executive officer of the iconic, Atlanta-based company.

Quincey, who has been with the company since 1996, has been CEO since 2017 and chair of the board since 2019. His compensation came in a combination of base pay, supplemented by stock awards, option awards, incentive pay and contributions to pensions.

Quincey received $1.6 million in base pay.

The other executives whose compensation was listed in the proxy include:

› John Murphy, the company’s president and CEO, who received $11.1 million, including $1.1 million in base pay.

› Manuel Arroyo,

Coca-Cola’s executive vice president and global chief marketing officer, who was paid $6.7 million, including $689,585 in base pay.

› Henrique Braun,

executive vice president and president of international development, who was paid $6.9 million, including $700,000 in base pay.

› Jennifer Mann,

executive vice president and president of the North American operating unit, who received $4.5 million, including $695,250 in base pay.

The company reported net revenues last year of $45.8 billion and net income of $10.7 billion.

Compensation is set by the company’s Talent and Compensation Committee, which consists of four members of the Coca-Cola board of directors: Helene Gayle, Carolyn Everson, Alexis Herman and Maria Elena Lagomasino. None is or has been an employee or officer of Coca-Cola.

In the proxy, the committee said compensation was set after considering a “comparator group” of other large, publicly traded companies like McDonald’s, Kraft Heinz, Procter & Gamble and Starbucks, but also some with little or no overlap to Coca-Cola’s business, like Abbott Laboratories, Archer-DanielsMidland Company and Intel Corp.

A sampling of available data indicated that the compensation for CocaCola’s CEO ranks fairly high among the executives of that group.

A group that monitors — and criticizes — executive pay last year placed Quincey number 59th on the list of “the 100 most overpaid CEOs.” That was only three slots above PepsiCo’s CEO, Ramon Laguarta. From the comparator group, only Nike’s CEO ranked higher, coming in at 18th with compensation of $28.8 million.

Coca-Cola’s compensation committee wrote in the proxy that it did not intend to copy other companies. “This comparator group is used as a reference point, but compensation paid at other companies is only one factor in the decisionmaking process,” the committee wrote.