17. Personnel expenses

Personnel expenses can be broken down as follows:

Wages and salaries shown in personnel expenses include expenses relating to severance payments of €81 million (2013/14: €93 million). In addition, wages and salaries include restructuring expenses of €82 million (2013/14: €29 million), which also comprise severance components. Variable remuneration, which is partly based on the performance metric EBITaC, increased to €124 million in financial year 2014/15 from €84 million in financial year 2013/14. Wages and salaries also include expenses for share-based payments totalling €7 million (2013/14: €3 million).

Annual average number of group employees:

This includes an absolute number of 60,341 (2013/14: 61,700) part-time employees. The percentage of employees working outside of Germany (full-time equivalents) stood at 65.2 per cent (2013/14: 66.1 per cent).