For the first time in at least a decade, the head of Johnson & Johnson’s medtech division is among the company’s highest-paid executives.
Ashley McEvoy’s 2022 payout made the list of J&J’s five largest compensation packages for the year, as detailed in a proxy statement published this month. Under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules, J&J is required to disclose the total compensation for its chief executive and financial officers and the three execs with the next-highest annual hauls.
McEvoy’s pay was fourth on the list, after CEO Joaquin Duato, CFO Joseph Wolk and Jennifer Taubert, worldwide chair of the company’s pharmaceuticals division. Rounding out the list was Thibaut Mongon, head of J&J’s consumer health business—though it’s unclear whether he’ll make 2023’s rankings, since J&J is planning on spinning out that division into a standalone company this year.
McEvoy and Mongon stepped into the vacancies on the list left by former J&J CEO Alex Gorsky, who handed the reins to Duato at the start of 2022, and Paul Stoffels, M.D., the company's former chief scientific officer, who's now CEO of Galapagos, the biotech he co-founded in 1999.
For all of 2022, McEvoy’s compensation totaled $7,390,161. With a salary of just under $1 million, the bulk of her payout came from stock and option awards—which brought in $3.9 million and $1.5 million, respectively.
In the proxy statement, J&J specifically highlighted McEvoy’s role in leading the company’s acquisition of Abiomed, a maker of minimally invasive heart pumps and lung support devices. That $16.6 billion deal—which was announced in November and closed within just a few weeks, well ahead of schedule—saw J&J offer up $380 per Abiomed share in an upfront payment, with the possibility of tacking on another $35 per share if Abiomed’s products hit certain milestones. The buyout marked J&J’s largest since 2017, when its Janssen pharmaceutical division put down $30 billion to acquire Actelion.
J&J also hailed McEvoy’s leadership in building out the medtech division’s pipeline and keeping its sales in line with those of the company’s main competitors.
Last year, J&J MedTech took in about $27.4 billion in sales, according to a full-year earnings report. That represented growth of about 1.4% compared to the $27.1 billion it earned the year before—an increase that jumps to more than 6% year over year when measured on an operational basis, which removes the impact of foreign exchange rates.
McEvoy has been at J&J for nearly three decades, spanning virtually her entire career. Throughout that time, she’s held leadership roles across the company’s consumer health and medtech divisions, including as worldwide president of surgical device segment Ethicon and head of J&J’s vision and diabetes care companies.
She took on her current role—as an executive VP at J&J and worldwide chair of its medtech business—in June 2018.
Additionally, just this month, McEvoy was unanimously elected to lead the board of medtech industry trade association AdvaMed—incidentally, taking the torch from former Abiomed CEO Michael Minogue. She’ll chair the board of directors for a two-year term.