Sundar Pichai's Pay Package Rises to Nearly $200 Million in 2016

Sundar Pichai's salary and stock award in 2016 totalled nearly $200 million (roughly Rs. 1,286 crores), double the amount he got in 2015. The India-born Google CEO's lavish compensation was attributed by the company to his promotion to CEO and "numerous successful product launches," CNN reported.

While Sundar Pichai's salary of $650,000 (roughly Rs. 4.1 crores) in 2016 is slightly less than the $652,500 (roughly Rs. 4.19 crores) he earned in 2015, his stock award grew roughly two times. The long-time Google executive, who was named CEO during the company's re-organisation in August 2015, received a stock award of $198.7 million (roughly Rs. 1,278 crores) in 2016, roughly double his 2015 stock award of $99.8 million (roughly Rs. 641.5 crores).

Larry Page, Google's co-founder and previous CEO, shifted his focus to growing new businesses under the Alphabet umbrella.

Under Sundar Pichai, Google has boosted sales from its core advertising and YouTube business, while also investing in machine learning, hardware and cloud computing, the CNN 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.

With Sundar Pichai at the helm Google's "other revenues," a category that includes hardware and cloud services, hit nearly $3.1 billion (roughly Rs. 19,930 crores) in the most recent quarter, a gain of about 50 percent from the same quarter a year earlier.

Alphabet's stock has soared this year, pushing it above a $600 billion (roughly Rs. 38,57,301 crores) market cap this week for the first time, the report said.