Google’s 44-year-old India-born CEO 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 CEO 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 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 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.
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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.
