Spotlight falls on Ocado boss Tim Steiner’s £100m in payouts

The boss of Ocado has collected nearly £100m since the online grocery company floated on the stock market in 2010, despite its share price now languishing below its flotation level, analysis has shown.Tim Steiner, a former Goldman Sachs trader who co-founded the British technology company in 2000, is thought to be in discussions over his future after it emerged Ocado had approached at least one potential replacement.Analysis of Ocado reports by the High Pay Centre showed Steiner has received £94m in payouts, including share awards the value of which are likely to have changed from the time. The figure raises “serious concerns about proportionality, accountability and fairness” in the pay-setting process, campaigners said.Steiner’s payouts included nearly £59m for 2019 largely thanks to a string of deals to sell its grocery-picking tech to foreign supermarkets.Tim Steiner, chief executive officer of Ocado. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty ImagesPaddy Goffey, head of research at the High Pay Centre campaign group, said: “Tim Steiner’s pay trajectory illustrates a broader problem in the UK’s broken executive pay framework: compensation is increasingly shaped by sporadic, outsized awards, rather than being linked to genuine performance.“The £59m figure in 2019 reveals how incentive structures can create extreme spikes in pay that are hard to reconcile with company performance or improvements in the working conditions and pay of employees.“This raises serious concerns about proportionality, accountability and fairness in the pay-setting process.”Steiner jointly set up the food delivery group in 2000 and led its stock market flotation 10 years later. A passionate advocate for the business, Steiner led the company through significant deals with Morrisons and Marks & Spencer and a recent tie-up with Asda, but has also faced shareholder unrest over his pay packets.Sky News reported last weekend that Ocado’s board had approached Niklas Heuveldop, the chief executive of Vonage, part of the Swedish telecoms group Ericsson. It is not clear whether Heuveldop is a preferred candidate for the role or how advanced Ocado’s board is in its succession planning.The company, which sells software and equipment to support online grocery shopping, said earlier this week that “the chief executive and the board continually engage in long-term succession planning and regularly engage with potential candidates”.Sources close to Ocado said the process was likely to have been launched by Ocado’s relatively new chair Adam Warby, who was appointed in December 2024 and who previously chaired the headhunter Heidrick & Struggles for five years.The sources believed the search had been kicked off quietly without consultation with Steiner as Warby had felt pressure to act amid the slump in Ocado’s share price.More than one source said that large shareholders and the board were likely to be divided over whether he should go.Shares in the business fell this week on reports of his potential exit, sinking to as low as 172p, short of the 2010 float price of 180p. Ocado has more shares in issue today than in 2010, and the company is worth about £1.4bn compared with £720m on flotation, but the new issues will have diluted many early shareholders’ stakes.The shares have fallen more than 90% in the past five years, having hit almost £28 during the Covid pandemic when Steiner suggested households were permanently shifting to buying their groceries online.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat optimism proved short-lived with Kroger, a big partner with Ocado in the US, announcing last November it was closing three warehouses using the UK company’s equipment. Two months later, Ocado revealed its Canadian partner, Sobeys, was closing its Calgary facility.Steiner this year admitted that “the market for large automated distribution centres in the US is smaller than we thought it would be”.Clive Black, an analyst at Shore Capital, said a plan to oust Steiner “wouldn’t be wholly unfathomable given the [low] share price and how much he pays himself”.Shore said Ocado’s returns on invested capital were poor and it had “barely made a profit” in its entire existence.However, he said Steiner had “single-handedly overseen the creation of a FTSE 100 business in Ocado” and those who had invested – and sold – shares at the right time had made “an awful lot of money”.Some large shareholders, such as Jörn Rausing, who controls a 10% stake and also sits on Ocado’s board, are thought to be supportive. Records indicate Rausing increased his stake with £5.4m more shares only in March.No main shareholders approached by the Guardian were prepared to speak up for, or against, Steiner.However, one Ocado insider said that Steiner’s exit would not be welcomed by senior managers in the company which was now seen to be “on the right track” in terms of tech development. They said “the majority [of insiders] back Tim. Going now could create extra problems internally. I think [the pressure] is coming from major shareholders.”Ocado declined to comment.