Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of Britain’s largest pharmaceutical company, received a 6.4% pay rise last year, taking his total remuneration to £17.7m.

The AstraZeneca boss is in line for a further increase this year, potentially making him the UK’s highest-paid chief executive once again.

Soriot received a salary of £1.5m, annual bonuses of £4.3m and long-term share bonuses worth £11.6m last year, according to AstraZeneca’s annual report, released on Tuesday.

His pay was up from £16.6m in 2024, but less than the £25m maximum package he could have received, depending on targets being met.

The news comes in a year when AstraZeneca, the most valuable company on the London Stock Exchange, cancelled a planned £450m expansion of its vaccine site in Speke, near Liverpool. The company also halted a £200m investment in research in Cambridge, where it has its headquarters, after a row between the industry and the government over drug pricing and the availability of new medicines on the NHS (such as its breast cancer infusion Enhertu, which is only available privately).

Soriot’s higher pay package reflects a 32% rise in AstraZeneca’s share price last year, when the drugmaker’s revenues rose 8% to $58.7bn on the back of strong cancer treatment sales, while profits were up 11%. It has 16 blockbuster medicines with annual sales of more than $1bn, and aims to have 25 by 2030; it is running more than 100 late-stage clinical trials at present.

This year, Soriot is in line for up to £19.6m in total pay – comprising a £1.6m salary, £4.3m in annual bonuses, a £2.1m share grant, and a potential £11.6m bonus from a long-term performance plan.

Soriot’s pay packets made him the best-paid CEO of a listed company several years in a row, triggering several shareholder rebellions, despite the company’s improved financial performance.

The High Pay Centre, which campaigns for fairer pay, found in August that the bosses of Britain’s largest listed companies took home record-high pay packets for the third year in a row. The highest paid chief executives were the current and former boss of Melrose, Peter Dilnot and Simon Peckham, who between them took home nearly £59m for the previous financial year, mostly because of long-term incentive payments.

Since joining from the Swiss rival Roche in August 2012, Soriot has rebuilt AstraZeneca’s then-threadbare pipeline of new drugs, fended off a hostile takeover bid from US rival Pfizer in 2014 and worked with the government on rolling out one of the Covid pandemic’s first vaccines, developed with Oxford University.