A termination and a delay: Vaccine giant Sanofi’s COVID-19 programs had a rough year. And the French pharma’s CEO pay also suffered.
Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson’s pay slightly dropped by 3.7% to 10.98 million euros (about $12.26 million) in 2021, the company’s annual filing (PDF) shows. The decrease was mainly the result of a 360,750 euros loss in the value of stock awards.
Hudson’s salary remained the same as in 2020 at 1.3 million euros, and his performance-based bonus slightly jumped to 2.31 million euros, or 177.6% of his fixed salary.
Missteps in the development of COVID-19 vaccines weren’t cited as problems in Hudson’s performance-based evaluation. Of all the targets that Sanofi had outlined for Hudson, only “growth in key assets” as part of the financial objectives was marked as below par because of vaccines. In that category, the company flagged underperformance of the U.S. influenza vaccine and the vaccine business in China.
When it comes to R&D efforts, Sanofi’s board gave Hudson a 130% score compared to the target, labeling pipeline progression as “ahead of forecasts.” For 2021, Sanofi ushered 10 first-in-class or best-in-class drug candidates into clinical development, filed nine regulatory submission and obtained 10 approvals, the scorecard shows.
Still, Sanofi suffered several R&D setbacks related to its COVID-19 vaccines. In September, the French pharma scrapped an mRNA vaccine candidate that it got from the $3.2 billion takeover of Translate Bio. The company at that time framed the shot’s interim results as positive but noted it was too late to bring an mRNA vaccine to market after the successful launches of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
For its own COVID shot developed with GlaxoSmithKline’s pandemic adjuvant, Sanofi first posted weak phase 1/2 data in late 2020 and pushed back its anticipated launch to late 2021. But in December, the readout was postponed further to the first quarter.
The two companies have posted the data for the shot as a booster in February, showing a 58% efficacy during a clinical trial that was affected by omicron.
Also last year, Hudson got the second tranche of its sign-on bonus in the form of 25,000 “phantom stock” units. For reporting purposes, the new bonus was valued at 2.02 million euros, slightly above the 2.01 million euros he got last year from the first batch.