High to low: how big is Prosus’s wage gap really?

Given the nature and global spread of Prosus’s activities, getting a handle on the ratio of pay between its top executives and lowest earners (as required by recently enacted amendments to the Companies Act) was always going to be a fraught exercise. An exercise with the potential to generate all sorts of figures stretching from the outrageously large to the encouragingly modest.

Inevitably there will be much disagreement over the figures.

For instance, you could exclude the annualised portion of CEO Fabricio Bloisi’s long-term incentives (LTIs) and pretend he’s just in it for the $1.8m (a modest R30m) he received in guaranteed pay and short-term incentives in financial 2026. This figure would not take any account of the annualised portion of the potential $57m LTI award he was allocated on joining Prosus in 2024 and which will pay out in 2028. Also ignored is any estimate of what the current annual value of his $100m moonshot agreement might be worth. That is, “if truly extraordinary net new value is created in the market capitalisation of the group”.

While you can be pretty sure Bloisi – an entrepreneur who helped grow Brazil’s iFood into a one of the country’s most valuable start-ups – would not have accepted the top job if he hadn’t been offered some pretty generous LTIs, the remuneration committee has chosen to offer shareholders a spectrum of wage gaps to choose from. Some include the incentives, some don’t. It means the ratio could be anything between 307:1 and 13:1.

Counting the incentives

The 307:1 is what you get if you include a portion of the $57m LTI in the calculation of Bloisi’s remuneration and compare it with the average annual pay of Prosus’s global employees. This comparison excludes the moonshot.

But if you exclude the LTIs altogether, then the ratio slumps to a far narrower 35:1.

Prosus can offer you something even lower if you were to focus only on employees in the Netherlands – presumably on the basis that its primary listing is there. In this case, the gap squeezes to a modest 13:1.

None of this – even at 307 times – seems too bad, particularly for a company with Prosus’s history of being exceedingly generous to its top executives.

However, it’s not quite the full picture. The ratio appears only to include full-time employees who largely fall into the category of “knowledge workers”. Their average annual remuneration is $58, 213.

What’s missing is the million-plus workers who are essential to Prosus delivering services to consumers across the globe from India, to Brazil, to South Africa and Europe. The customers of iFood, Just Eat Takeaway, Delivery Hero, Swiggy, Zomato and Takealot, to mention the most notable.

They make no appearance in Prosus’s remuneration report because as far as Prosus is concerned, all of these delivery workers are self-employed contractors. Not that the group doesn’t take them seriously. Last year it published something of a paean to the gig economy, which it described as a powerful force for change.

Life as a gig worker

This new global ecosystem is a force for economic growth and job creation, wrote Prajna Khanna, Prosus’s vice-president for sustainability. “Digital platforms have created a new form of work, founded on new business models that have shown exponential promise – for consumers and for gig workers.”

The report may have been a response to shareholders raising concerns at its 2024 AGM about the treatment of delivery workers under Bloisi when he previously headed up iFood, which controlled 80% of the Brazilian food delivery market. The Shareholder Association for Research and Education was worried Bloisi, just appointed Prosus CEO, would extend the same controversial labour practices across the wider Prosus group.

In her report Khanna was evidently keen to present a more upbeat perspective on life as a gig worker.

“Online work has brought an epoch of opportunity, especially in fast-growing emerging economies,” she wrote. “Work in the gig economy, often with low barriers to entry, represents a route into formalised economic activity from the informal sector where needs are most acute.”

Kwanele Ngogela, senior inequality analyst at Just Share, is evidently not persuaded by the upbeat message. He describes the exclusion of drivers in the pay gap analysis as a fundamental omission.

“Prosus discusses the CEO-to-tech-employee pay gap, yet this excludes perhaps the most economically significant workforce in its e-commerce ecosystem: platform couriers. If your largest growth business depends on delivery workers, then limiting internal pay-gap analysis to salaried technology employees presents an incomplete picture of inequality,” Ngogela tells Currency.

He says the Prosus remuneration report makes much of seeking a level playing field and paying fairly and responsibly across its operations. The report talks of the group’s philosophy being built on paying for growth and creating shareholder value and claims its future growth story is no longer Chinese internet giant Tencent.

“Throughout the integrated report, management positions e-commerce as the engine of future value creation … iFood alone delivers more than 120-million monthly orders and AI is used to optimise 30-million delivery routes every month,” Ngogela says.

Incomplete picture

But the delivery routes aren’t completed by algorithms – they’re completed by hundreds of thousands of workers, he says, who are not treated as employees. In this context discussing the pay gap in reference only to tech employees presents an incomplete picture.

The incompleteness is all the more stark given how Prosus’s executive wealth is increasingly justified by e-commerce performance, contends Ngogela. Rather than asking if the CEO is worth $100m, Ngogela suggests investors ask: “Can exceptional executive wealth be justified where a significant share of e-commerce value is generated through workers who sit outside traditional employment protections?”

He believes, based on growing criticism and recent regulatory initiatives, this is where the remuneration conversation is heading globally. “It is where investors should begin asking harder questions.”