Kim Taek-jin, CEO of NCSoft, Earns 108 Times the Average Employee Salary

LeadersIndex, Analysis of Business Reports of Top 500 Companies

Last year, the wage gap between the highest-paid employees and average workers at major domestic companies was found to be as much as 16 times.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

According to an analysis of the 2022 business reports of the top 500 domestic companies by Leaders Index, a corporate analysis research institute, the average compensation of the highest-paid employees was 1.41237 billion KRW, while the average wage of general employees was 90.92 million KRW. This represents a 15.5 times difference, which is a decrease compared to 2021 (22.2 times).

The company with the largest wage gap was NCSoft. CEO Kim Taek-jin's annual salary was 12.381 billion KRW, which was 108.6 times higher than the average employee salary of 114 million KRW. By industry, the wage gaps were notably large in services (129.2 times), food and beverage (112.9 times), pharmaceuticals (93.9 times), and automotive/parts (85.6 times). Conversely, the industries with the smallest gaps were banking (13.6 times), followed by credit finance (15.6 times), telecommunications (27.3 times), and insurance (28.4 times).

The industry with the highest average annual salary for general employees was holding companies (184 million KRW), followed by securities (142 million KRW), telecommunications (123 million KRW), credit finance (116 million KRW), banking (108 million KRW), petrochemicals (106 million KRW), trading companies (105 million KRW), and insurance (104 million KRW).

The average annual salary for non-registered executives was 324 million KRW. The highest was Krafton (2.38 billion KRW), followed by Meritz Securities (1.38031 billion KRW), E1 (880 million KRW), SK Hynix (755 million KRW), LG (738 million KRW), Shinsegae (737 million KRW), SKC (726 million KRW), POSCO Holdings (704 million KRW), Samsung Electronics (703 million KRW), and NCSoft (694 million KRW).