AstraZeneca boss takes home £15m pay packet after profits rise

The boss of drugmaker AstraZeneca was handed a pay package worth nearly £15 million last year, new company accounts reveal.

The Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company behind a variety of medicines paid its chief executive Pascal Soriot £14.7 million in 2024.

This was made up of a salary worth £1.5 million, an annual bonus and long-term incentive awards.

It cements Mr Soriot’s position as one of the highest-paid chief executives of FTSE 100 companies.

“Despite an increasingly volatile environment globally, Mr Soriot has led AstraZeneca to deliver strong results in 2024, with another year of robust top line growth and impressive results from the pipeline,” the company said.

The business generated a pre-tax profit of 8.7 billion dollars (£6.9 billion) for the year, about a quarter higher than in 2023, it said earlier this month.

A jump in the group’s total revenues was partly driven by a 24% rise in sales of oncology treatments – those used for cancer patients.

AstraZeneca, which also makes vaccines, said it was expecting to make progress on several new medicines this year.

But the firm recently scrapped plans to build a £450 million vaccine manufacturing plant in Merseyside, saying Labour failed to match the previous government’s offer of support.

Mr Soriot said he was “very disappointed” by the move but that the company “couldn’t make the investment economically viable”.

His 2024 pay is nonetheless lower than the £16.9 million pay packet the chief executive took home in 2023.

AstraZeneca faced resistance from some shareholders last year who voted against proposals to change its executive pay policy, which could have seen the chief executive earn as much as £18.7 million last year.

The plans nonetheless gained enough backing to be passed.

A spokesman for AstraZeneca said on the latest payout: “The remuneration of our executive directors and our wider workforce reflects the underlying performance of the company, which has generated a total shareholder return of 33% over the past three years.”