Google CEO Sundar Pichai received nearly $199.7 million in compensation last year, double the amount he made in 2015, according to a filing Friday from Google’s parent company, Alphabet(GOOGL, Tech30).
Pichai’s base pay was a mere $650,000. On top of that, he received a stock award for $198.7 million. The company’s compensation committee attributed the lavish pay to Pichai’s promotion to CEO and “numerous successful product launches.”
Pichai, a longtime Google executive, took over as CEO as part of a corporate restructuring in 2015. Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and previous CEO, shifted his focus to growing new businesses under the Alphabet umbrella.
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Under Pichai, Google has boosted sales from its core advertising and YouTube business, while also investing in machine learning, hardware and cloud computing.
In 2016, Google unveiled new smartphones, a virtual reality headset, a router, and a voice controlled smart speaker similar to the Amazon Echo.
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% 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.
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Source: CNN