PICHAI EARNED USD 200 MN

44-year-old Indian CEO got double the compensation from 2015

His 2016 earning is double the amount he got in 2015.

Houston, April 29: Google’s 44-year-old Indiaborn CEO Sundar Pichai received nearly $200 million (`1,280 crore approximately, @ `64 per US dollar) in compensation last year, double the amount that he got in 2015.

Mr Pichai received a salary of $6,50,000 last year, slightly less than the $652,500 he had earned in 2015.

But the long-time Google employee, who was named CEO during the company’s re-organisation in August 2015, also received a stock award of $198.7 million in 2016, roughly double his 2015 stock award of $99.8 million.

The company’s compensation committee attributed the lavish pay to Mr Pichai’s promotion to CEO and “numerous successful product launches”, the CNN reported. Mr Pichai’s total compensation tops the CEO compensation packages tracked by Equilar for the past two years.

Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and former CEO, has shifted his focus to growing new businesses under the Alphabet umbrella.

Under Mr Pichai, Google has boosted sales from its core advertising and YouTube business, while also investing in machine learning, hardware and cloud computing, the report said. In 2016, Google unveiled new smartphones, a virtual reality headset, a router, and a voice controlled smart speaker. These efforts have started to pay off.

Google’s “other revenues”, a category that includes hardware and cloud services, hit nearly $3.1 billion in the most recent quarter, a gain of about 50 per cent from the same quarter a year earlier.

Alphabet’s stock soared this year, pushing it above a $600 billion market cap this week for the first time.