Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel received an annual compensation package worth $19.87 million last year, the largest he’s ever received at the company.
The 16.4% increase—at grant value—came despite the company’s revenue falling sharply thanks to poor sales from its two marketed vaccines.
Despite adding another therapy to its now two-product portfolio with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine mRESVIA, swiftly declining COVID vaccine sales and tame mRESVIA contributions sank Moderna’s 2024 net sales down 53% from 2023. The company collected $3.2 billion in total revenue during the year, a far cry from the highs of the pandemic era and from the prior year’s $6.8 billion.
Meanwhile, Moderna increased Bancel’s base salary by 4% to $1.6 million last year and awarded him a $1.9 million bonus, the company revealed in a recent proxy filing (PDF). A remaining $15 million of the CEO’s compensation package came from equity awards split evenly between stock and options. He also received nearly $960,000 in "other" compensation tied to security expenses.
Overall, Bancel’s annual compensation increased from 2023’s $17.1 million and from 2022’s $19.4 million, which was previously his record-high in total annual compensation. Importantly, in 2022 Bancel collected more than $392 million from exercising stock options that had been previously granted to him.
The CEO's base salary increase is common practice, but cash bonus decisions are made individually. In early 2024, Moderna’s compensation committee set Bancel’s performance-based bonus maximum at 150% of his salary, which would have come out to $2.45 million if he met all of his goals. Last month, though, a performance assessment left his bonus at 80% of the maximum target.
According to the company's proxy, Bancel himself and Chief Financial Officer Jamey Mock, who also received a below-target bonus, proposed the lesser payouts. Their lower bonuses stand to reinforce “the importance of financial planning” given the “shortfall” in the company’s product sales goal.
Moderna’s stock price has faced “significant pressure” after the historic highs achieved over the pandemic, having dropped from $253.98 at the end of 2021 to $41.58 at year-end 2024, according to the securities filing. Now, the transition to a post-COVID era has been “more complex than anticipated,” with Moderna’s revenue growth taking a hit as a result, the company's board described in the document.
The sinking stock price also impacted the value of long-term equity awards that were granted to its executives in previous years. To compensate for the significant loss in value of the stock-based equity awards originally granted to key executives upon joining the company, Moderna and its board opted to dole out two rounds of special equity awards in 2024 to Mock and Chief Legal Officer Shannon Klinger.
It's also worth noting that the $19.87 million is not what Bancel can take home now. Following common business standards, Moderna's compensation for its C-level execs includes company shares that the execs can't bag until years later.
When evaluating its payout for a three-year performance-based stock award granted to Bancel in 2022, Moderna's board determined a mere 55% achievement of prior goals. Coupled with a declining share price, the value of that award has shrunk from $3.59 million—as reflected in his 2022 pay package—to $409,297.
At the helm of a two-product company that just recently rose to the big leagues in the industry, Bancel’s total pay in 2024 came in below the compensation for some Big Pharma leaders last year, such as Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks' $29.2 million or Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato’s $24.3 million.
Still, his pay remains on an uphill trajectory and puts him roughly on par with AbbVie’s new CEO Robert Michael’s $18.5 million and above others such as Bayer CEO Bill Anderson’s 8.84 million euros ($9.6 million).