Hyundai Motor Group, which owns Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors, was the highest-paying conglomerate in Korea last year, outpacing other big names such as Samsung, SK and LG, data showed Thursday.

According to data compiled from the nation’s top 10 conglomerates, the Korean auto giant paid out an average of 92.8 million won ($84,640) for ordinary workers in 2014, up 2.86 percent from the previous year.

That was the highest figure, followed by Samsung Group’s 87.42 million won and Hyundai Heavy Industries’ 74.86 million won.


Also at the top were POSCO with 73.53 million won, SK with 72.84 million won, Hanwha with 68.17 million won, LG with 63.2 million won, GS with 57.88 million won, Hanjin with 57.64 million won and Lotte with 37.31 million.

Among individual affiliates of the groups, Samsung Electronics and SK Telecom remained the top-paying companies, with their average pay exceeding 120 million won. Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors came in second with 97 million won.

Across the top 10 conglomerates, executives were awarded 980 million won on average, while ordinary rank-and-file workers received an average of around 76.32 million won.

The executive pay decreased 4.52 percent from a year ago, but the pay for ordinary workers increased 3.29 percent during the same period.

Samsung Group offered the highest executive pay, averaging 1.47 billion won, 16.9 times what its ordinary workers earned.

The executive-to-worker pay gap reached 87.1-fold at its flagship Samsung Electronics, where executives received 8.33 billion won on average.

Executive pay at Hyundai and Hanwha followed with 1.43 billion won and 1.08 billion won, respectively.

In Korea, there were 668 employees who took home more than 500 million won last year, down from 699 a year ago. Of them, 200 or 29.9 percent were executives at the top 10 conglomerates.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)