Wipro CEO Thierry Delaporte paid $10 million in FY23, Exec Chairman Rishad Premji’s variable pay docked

Rishad Premji's pay for the year Premji’s pay for the year was down to $950k from last year’s $1.8 million.

Wipro Executive Chairman Rishad Premji saw his commission as part of his annual remuneration docked for FY23, owing to the fact that Wipro’s incremental consolidated net profit for the year was negative. Premji is entitled to a commission of 0.35 percent on incremental consolidated net profits, and due to it being negative, no commission was payable.

According to Wipro’s 20-F filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Premji’s overall pay for the year was down to $951,353, from last year’s $1.8 million. His salary is also down to $861k from last year’s $1.1 million.

This comes at a time when Wipro’s growth is slowing and the company expects a degrowth in revenue in the first quarter of FY24, which it attributed to the larger macro environment. The company has guided revenue growth of -3 to -1 percent in Q1FY24.

Thierry Delaporte, the Chief Executive Officer earned $10 million for FY23. He’s seen a minor reduction in compensation from FY22’s $10.5 million. Delaporte earned $1.6 million in salary, $1.3 million in variable pay, $4.17 million in deferred compensation, and the remaining $2.9 million was grouped in the ‘others’ bracket.

In FY22, Delaporte was the second highest-paid CEO among the large IT companies. In the preceding year, Infosys CEO Salil Parekh had earnings of $9.36 million, outgoing TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan earned $4.48 million, with the highest being that of HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar who earned $16.5 million after getting a two-year long-term incentive of $12.5 million.

Wipro Chief Financial Officer Jatin Dalal has seen a reduction in pay in FY23 too, earning $1.084 million in 2022, from $1.5 million in FY22.

The Bengaluru-based IT major saw its employee costs increase during the year as well.

Also read: Wipro chairman Rishad Premji takes 50 percent paycut this year

“In absolute terms, cost of revenues increased by 16.11 percent, primarily due to an increase in employee compensation due to the impact of salary increases, including promotions, and increase in headcount, including through acquisitions, incremental sub-contracting costs incurred to fulfill vacant positions, increase in travel expenses as travel restrictions related to COVID-19 eased, and increase in software license expenses,” the filing said.

The CEO’s pay staying at the same level comes at a time when there has been a widening disparity between the pay of CEOs and fresh graduates. In fact, in FY23, a constant issue characterising Wipro’s struggles has been the delay in onboarding graduates of 2022 who the company had made offers to. A year on, many of them continue to wait, and the company has maintained that they will be onboarded on the basis of business requirements.