Sundar Pichai, the India-born CEO of Google, saw his compensation almost double to $200 million in (calendar year) 2016, the spike coming mainly from stock awards. Interestingly, his salary actually was lower when compared to 2015.
Pichai, who was appointed as CEO in August 2015, received $650,000 in salary and $198.7 million in stock award in 2016, in comparison to $652,500 in salary and $99.8 million in stock award.
The compensation committee of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, said that the compensation was paid keeping in mind Pichai's elevation and "numerous successful product launches", reported the CNN, citing regulatory filings by Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet's net revenues (net of traffic acquisition costs) income for 2016 was $73,479 million and was projected at $86,669 million by Nomura analysts in a note last month. Net income came in at $19,478 million last year (2016) and estimated at $23,062 million for 2017.
Under his leadership, Google's sales buoyed, especially the the core advertising and YouTube business, apart from investments in machine learning, hardware and cloud computing.
Google's "other revenues" comprising hardware and cloud services, rose almost 50 percent to $3,095 million in the quarter ended March 2017 (Q1) from $2,072 million in the corresponding period last year (2016), according to statements put up on Alphabet's website.
Overall revenues for the quarter rose 22 percent YoY to $24.75 billion for Q1 while the net income was $5.42 billion, up from $4.2 billion in the first quarter of 2016.
"Our excellent results represent a terrific start to 2017, with revenues up 22% versus the first quarter of 2016 and 24% on a constant currency basis. We clearly continue to benefit from our ongoing investments in product innovation and have great momentum in our new businesses across Alphabet," Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet, said.
It may be recalled that ad revenues of YouTube were perceived as taking a huge hit in view of advertisers pulling out over placement of offensive content along with advertisements on the video-sharing website.
"While we believe YouTube is indeed capable of introducing solutions that remedy brand safety concerns, we anticipate the direct cumulative negative impact to revenue could ultimately approximate $750 million, weighted heavily to 2Q17 and 3Q17," Nomura analysts Anthony DiClemente and Kevin Rippey had said in a note last month.
