Saugata Gupta, MD & chief executive officer of Marico, best known for its Saffola and Parachute brands, has regained the top spot as the country’s highest-paid FMCG CEO in FY25.
The Marico top boss, who last topped the list of highest-paid FMCG CEOs in FY22 and FY23, was pipped to the post in FY24, when ITC‘s chairman and MD Sanjiv Puri had walked away with the highest compensation that year.
Gupta took home a total remuneration of Rs 39.14 crore in FY25, a growth of 65.1% versus last year. Godrej Consumer‘s MD & CEO Sudhir Sitapati secured the second spot on the list at Rs 35.12 crore, seeing a sharp 84.6% growth in FY25 compensation versus FY24.
ITC’s Puri, Nestle India‘s CMD Suresh Narayanan and Hindustan Unilever‘s CEO & MD Rohit Jawa (both Narayanan and Jawa will demit office on July 31) were the third, fourth and fifth-highest paid FMCG chief executives in FY25, but the year-on-year rate of growth in compensation for these professionals was weak. In Puri and Jawa’s case, it was just 1.9% and 3.8% each, while Narayanan’s remuneration growth was flat in FY25, reflecting the challenges the sector was facing on account of an urban slowdown, industry and HR experts said.
Narayanan’s FY24 remuneration has been annualised (Rs 23.52 crore) to arrive at the FY25 growth rate. His FY24 compensation was for 15 months at Rs 29.40 crore, according to the company’s annual report.
CEO Pay Trends
“The domestic FMCG sector has had to deal with both slowdown concerns as well as growing competition from small and regional brands at the lower end and direct-to-consumer brands at the upper end. Market leaders were not immune to these pressures, which reflected in CEO compensation for these companies,” Ajay Shah, HR expert and founder-president of upGrad Rekrut, said.
Yet, the compensation of the above three executives was 121 to 377 times more than the median remuneration of employees in these companies, their annual reports show. While Puri drew a total remuneration of Rs 25.66 crore in FY25; Narayanan’s total compensation was Rs 23.47 crore and Jawa took home a pay package of Rs 23.23 crore for the year.
A recent Deloitte survey on executive compensation notes that the average CEO remuneration in India saw a 13% year-on-year increase in 2025, with the median annual package touching Rs 10 crore. This rise, it said, was largely fuelled by variable and performance-linked components that now form 60% of top executives’ total compensation, leaving only 40% of the total pay package as fixed.
Sitapati’s salary, for instance, stood at Rs 6.94 crore in FY25, but his total compensation for the year was led by perquisites (Rs 16.05 crore) and performance-linked variable remuneration or PVLR (Rs 11.84 crore), which was given to him for the previous year’s performance, as per company policy. FY25’s PVLR will reflect in FY26, GCPL said in its latest annual report.
Gupta, meanwhile, took home a salary of Rs 11.41 crore and annual performance incentives of Rs 6.34 crore in FY25. But the bump-up in compensation was led by stock options exercised by him during the year which stood at Rs 20.86 crore. Excluding this, Gupta’s remuneration for FY25 stood at Rs 18.26 crore, according to its latest annual report.
Mid-Tier CEOs See Double-Digit Pay Hikes
Dabur’s CEO Mohit Malhotra, Tata Consumer’s MD & CEO Sunil D’Souza and Colgate-Palmolive India’s MD & CEO Prabha Narasimhan took home pay packages of Rs 15.84 crore, Rs 13.01 crore and Rs 12.08 crore each in FY25, a growth rate of 8-32% versus last year, their annual reports show.
Barring Dabur, where Malhotra’s pay hike was just 8.2%, both Tata Consumer and Colgate-Palmolive gave double-digit pay hikes (28.4% and 31.7% each) to their top executives.
This came as Tata Consumer’s revenue from operations rose 16% to Rs 17,618 crore, with 9% organic growth in FY25 versus last year, while Colgate-Palmolive’s top line rose 6.3% to Rs 5,999 crore during the year, recording mid-single-digit value growth.