Chipotle CEOs Take Massive Pay Cut

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Chipotle CEOs Take Massive Pay Cut

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The co-CEOs of Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. (NYSE: CMG) paid a terrible price financially for a year in which its shares were punished after tainted food was discovered at a number of its restaurants.

Steve Ells and Monty Moran suffered compensation cuts from $29 million in 2014 to $1.39 million in 2015. Ells founded Chipotle Mexican Grill in 1993 and has become fabulously rich as its stock posted an extraordinary increase for years. Each man owns between 1% and 2% of Chipotle Mexican Grill, and their holdings have lost a great deal of their value.

After a run that began in 2011 and ended in mid-2015, Chipotle Mexican Grill shares rose 200%. In the past year, they are down 24%.
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Recent results show the extent to which the food poisoning hit the company:

Highlights for the fourth quarter of 2015 as compared to the fourth quarter of 2014 include:

  • Revenue decreased 6.8% to $997.5 million
  • Comparable restaurant sales decreased 14.6%
  • Restaurant level operating margin was 19.6%, a decrease of 700 basis points
  • Net income was $67.9 million, a decrease of 44.0%
  • Diluted earnings per share was $2.17, a decrease of 43.5%
  • Opened 79 new restaurants
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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