The India-born Google CEO Sunder Pichai received nearly $200 million in compensation in 2016 which is double the amount he got in 2015, reported American news network, CNN.
According to the report, search giant CEO, Pichai received a salary of $650,000 last year, slightly less than the $652,500 he earned in 2015. But he 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 CEO and “numerous successful product launches.
Pichai was named Google CEO during the company’s reorganisation in August 2015. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, and previous CEO shifted his focus to growing new businesses under the Alphabet umbrella.
Under Pichai leadership over the past two years, 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 launches new smartphones, a virtual reality headset, a router, and a voice-controlled smart speaker. These efforts have started to pay off for the company, said the report.
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.
Pichai joined Google in 2004. Initially, he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google’s client software products. Later on he started taking care of Google Android. In August 2010, he was appointed CEO of Google, when the co-founder Larry Page decided to broaden his focus to emerging opportunities under under the Alphabet umbrella.
Pichai did his schooling in Tamil Nadu and graduation from IIT Kharagpur before moving to USA to study at Stanford University and later on at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for MBA.
