Sundar Pichai's compensation doubles to $200 million

Houston - Company's compensation committee attributed the lavish pay to Pichai's promotion to CEO

Google's India-born Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai took home nearly US $200 million (roughly Rs. 1,285 crore) last year, double the amount he got in 2015. Pichai received a salary of US $650,000 last year, slightly less than the US $652,500 he earned in 2015.
 
But the long-time Google employee, who was named the company's CEO during the company's reorganisation in August 2015, received a stock award of US $198.7 million in 2016, roughly double his 2015 stock award of US $99.8 million.
 
The company's compensation committee attributed the lavish pay to Pichai's promotion to CEO and "numerous successful product launches", the CNN reported.
 
Larry Page, Google's co-founder and previous CEO, 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 for the company. Google's "other revenues", a category that includes hardware and cloud services, hit nearly USD 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 USD 600 billion market cap this week for the first time, the report said.