Hennes & Mauritz workers get huge bonus fund

Employees around the world get proceeds from earnings annually from millions of dollars of H&M stock. 

• 

  Number 13 and the richest Swede on Forbes list: Stefan Persson (H&M), all smiles at the store opening at Lexington and 59th Street, Manhattan, New York in 2004. Photographed by Catarina Lundgren Åström

• To encourage employees’ long term employee involvement with the company, the internationally successful Swedish clothing retailer H&M (Hennes & Mauritz) is giving 4,040,404 of its public stock shares, which have an estimated worth of $137 million, to the firm's own workers in all its divisions around the world.

• 

  Stefan Persson at the store opening in New York with then CEO Rolf Eriksen left, who was replaced by a third generation Persson, Karl-Johan Persson, in early 2009. Photographed by Catarina Lundgren Åström

• “The idea is to create a long-term incentive program which is the same for all employees. Our hope is that employees will be able to benefit from H&M’s value growth in the same manner as a shareholder,” stated Stefan Persson, Chairman of the Board, who is Sweden’s second richest individual after Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad.

• H&M also hopes that the measure, which is based on the amount of time worked with the company and unrelated to position or salary level, will benefit future recruitment during H&M's major global expansion. Payouts to workers will being in 2011, and all their employees around the world who have worked for the company for at least five years are eligible.

• Donated in early September by the Persson family - H&M's major shareholder with 37% of the stock and 70% of the voting rights - the funds are being transferred to a newly established Swedish foundation, Stiftelsen H&M Incentive Program. The company intends to make future contributions to the foundation equivalent to 10% of the increase in share 12 month dividends.

• Hennes & Mauritz was established in Västerås, a city in central Sweden, in 1947 by Erling Persson, the grandfather of its current CEO, Karl-Johan Persson. Following after the American based Gap and the Spanish based Inditex, H&M is today the world's third largest fashion chain, and it has more than 2,000 retail outlets in some 35 nations.