Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s pay: Over half a million dollars a day

Google’s 44-year-old India-born Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai received nearly $200 million in compensation last year, double the amount he got in 2015. Pichai received a salary of $650,000 last year, slightly less than the $652,500 he earned in 2015.

But the long-time Google employee, who was named chief executive officer during the company’s reorganisation in August 2015, 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 Pichai’s promotion to chief executive officer and “numerous successful product launches”, CNN reported.

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and previous chief executive officer, shifted his focus to growing new businesses under the Alphabet umbrella.

Under 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 for the company.

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 has soared this year, pushing it above a $600 billion market cap this week for the first time, the report said.

Google has launched a ‘Solve for India’ initiative under which it will reach out to entrepreneurs in cities like Indore, Nagpur and Madurai to help them develop solutions in areas like agri- tech, healthcare and sanitation.