Silver Fern Farms CEO gets 40pc pay hike

REWARDED: Silver Fern Farms chief executive Keith Cooper is in line for a 40 percent pay hike.

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Silver Fern Farms chief executive Keith Cooper has enjoyed a 40 percent jump in salary to nearly $870,000.

The information about salary of staff earning more than $100,000 a year is in SFF's annual report for the year to August 31, 2009, released yesterday.

Cooper's salary package rose from nearly $620,000 in the year to August 2008 to nearly $870,000 in the August 2009 year.

The $870,000 salary package included a performance payment related to the year before. In that year SFF made a profit of $23 million after $51m of costs related to plant closures and redundancies.

Chairman Eoin Garden said it was a tough, highly competitive export industry with aggressive players and a wide skill set was required of the chief executive. And SFF was a large business with turnover of just over $2 billion.

"To manage a business of this size is no mean feat."

A performance element in Cooper's salary was introduced only 18 months ago.

Cooper received the big pay rise after a review of his salary package by consultants Sheffield. Garden said their survey of salary packages of chief executives in comparable companies indicated Cooper was underpaid at about $620,000.

This year to August 31, SFF made a profit of $5m after one-off gains were excluded.

"It's not the increase that's important. It's his salary relative to the business and it is right in the medium of similar businesses of this size and this type," Garden said.

The pay review was initiated by the board which was conscious it had to be competitive with management salaries, he said. He did not think it was appropriate to reveal how much of Cooper's pay was an "at risk" performance component. It was at the mid to lower end of the scale for similar businesses.

The annual report shows that SFF staff earning more than $100,000 jumped to 111 from 87 the year before.

Garden said it had been a successful year and the company met its targets.

It paid off $50m of debt, increased shareholders' equity and spent on innovation technology.

But he did not view the company or the industry on one-year performance measurements.

Companies in this sector required longer-term plans. In three years SFF had paid off more than $200m of debt.

- © Fairfax NZ News