Two years ago, Rubin Ritter, 40, announced his retirement as co-head of the Berlin fashion retailer Zalando. The business graduate, who came to Zalando in 2010 (original advertising slogan: “Scream with happiness”), said at the time that he wanted his wife – a judge – to give him the opportunity to have a better career. He has been out since June 2021, according to his Linkedin profile he is now on parental leave.
For his last year at the head of the Dax company, he can now look forward to an unusually high payment. As can be seen from the annual report for 2021, Ritter received remuneration of 89 million euros. The largest proportion of this is attributable to stock options that Ritter received in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Zalando went public in 2014 and has been a member of the German Stock Index (Dax) since 2021. Even before his resignation was announced, he exercised options worth 42.5 million euros, and then another for 46.6 million.
The acting co-CEOs, the two Zalando founders Robert Gentz and David Schneider, also receive record-breaking remuneration: Thanks to the 2021 option programs, they each received EUR 45.5 million. Zalando had already paid high management board remuneration in the previous year, for example Ritter received remuneration of 53.3 million euros in 2020 – in addition to the current 89 million euros. Last year, Zalando announced at the annual general meeting that it would introduce an upper limit for the remuneration of the CEOs of 15.75 million euros, and 10.5 million for normal board members. However, this does not apply retrospectively.
The head of Deutsche Post comes to around ten million euros
The remuneration of the Management Board is also very high in a German comparison. Deutsche Post boss Frank Appel, for example, received around ten million euros for 2020, VW boss Herbert Diess was 7.7 million euros. Zalando emphasized in the annual report that the options for the current and former board members were granted for services in the years 2011 to 2017 when the company was “in an early stage of development”. The company was never deprived of money as a result, the shares came from the conditional capital. There was a similar effect in 2021 with the Berlin delivery service Delivery Hero. Its boss and founder Niklas Östberg received total remuneration of 45.7 million euros for 2020, also thanks to stock bonuses that have been accumulated for years.
The Zalando share fell slightly on Friday to just under 46 euros, the company is currently worth around twelve billion euros on the stock exchange. The share price has been falling for months, last summer the price was more than 100 euros.