Recently, there has been a heated discussion about Li Xiang's sky high "annual salary" of 639 million yuan in 2024.
According to Cover News, Ideal Auto responded that in fact, Li Xiang's total actual salary for 2024 is 2.66 million yuan. The disclosed 639 million yuan currently belongs to the company's special accounting expense method for options under US listed companies (US accounting standards), and is not Li Xiang's actual salary income.
According to the publicly available stock incentive plan of Ideal Automobile, if Li Xiang receives the 18 million stock option rewards, he needs to complete the company's set sales volume. If the option plan is to be executed, Li Xiang himself will also pay an additional cost of $29.26/ADS (1 ADS for US stock=2 A-shares for Hong Kong stock, corresponding to a 1:2 ratio, with a current market price of approximately $25/ADS). Based on the closing price of 25.68 US dollars on May 6th, if Li Xiang wants to execute this option plan, not only will there be no profit, but he will also need to pay back 32 million US dollars, equivalent to 230 million RMB.
This option incentive plan was released in 2021 to motivate Li Xiang, as the CEO of the company, to lead Ideal Automobile to achieve a long-term challenge goal of delivering 3 million vehicles per year. Ideal Automobile's delivery volume in 2020 was 32600 vehicles, and the option incentive corresponds to a long-term challenge goal of nearly 100 times growth.
