Global Technology Companies Pay Spanish Workers ‘Gold’ Salaries

Global Technology Companies Pay Spanish Workers ‘Gold’ Salaries.

Large global US technology companies that operate in Spain have earned themselves a bad reputation which is partly deserved as, despite their gargantuan profits, they barely pay taxes using clever- but totally legal- tax avoidance practices by locating their tax headquarters in countries with lax taxation rules.

It’s all about profitability

However, they pay their employees much better salaries than the national average that Spanish technology companies pay. The main reason is the profitability obtained per worker is much higher than that achieved by Spanish national companies.

How much?

Workers from the Spanish subsidiaries of Facebook, Netflix, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft earn on average between €131,000 euros and €205,000 gross per year, that works out to between €10,900 and €17,000 gross per month, before social security charges, according to the latest figures declared by the companies 2019 accounts deposited in the Mercantile Registry.

On average, the salary in Spain is €24,009 euros per year and the so-called most frequent salary, the one that is obtained by most workers, is €18,468 euros, according to the latest survey available from National Institute of Statistics (INE), corresponding to 2018.

Workers more than justify their high salary cost as the average turnover per employee of these firms ranges from 4.67 million euros per year registered by Facebook to €283,000 euros by Twitter or €170,000 by HBO, according to industry reports.

However, as mentioned in the opening paragraph, it has to be taken into account that the real income of the Spanish subsidiaries of these companies is much higher than those declared in the Mercantile Registry since they divert a large part of that billing to companies outside of Spain in countries such as Ireland, the Netherlands or Luxembourg to lighten the tax bill.

The real income per employee is probably even higher than the declared one, therefore. Here are some examples of the salaries technology companies in Span pay their employees:

Telefónica España, for example, pays an average gross annual salary of €31,328 euros to its 23,091 employees; The 5,456 workers of Orange Spain receive an average salary of €39,589 euros; Vodafone Spain, with a staff of 4,574 people, pays €45,693 euros; and MásMóvil, the one that pays the best among operators, rises to €61,485 euros for it’s 875 workers, according to the 2019 corporate reports (except Orange, which corresponds to 2018).

Salaries paid by global technology companies in Spain are brilliant, but they pale in comparison when compared to what the same professionals earn in the United States, the main country of origin of all these firms where an American employee in the same position earns between double and triple of their Spanish counterparts.

Source: El Pais