At Rs 50 crore, Wipro’s Pallia becomes the second-highest paid CEO in industry

Srinivas Pallia, CEO, Wipro

Wipro's CEO Srinivas Pallia, with an annual remuneration package of approximately Rs 50 crore, is the second-highest paid chief executive officer in the information technology industry.

Wipro announced on April 29 that Pallia's base salary would be in the range of $1.75 million to $3 million, supplemented by variable pay potentially reaching an additional $1.75 million to $3 million annually.

Earlier, Pallia’s predecessor Thierry Delaporte drew the highest pay among the top six Indian IT companies at Rs 82.4 crore ($10 million) in FY22-23. On April 6, the software major appointed Srinivas Pallia as the CEO and MD of the company after Delaporte stepped down a year earlier than scheduled.

The top spot currently is with Infosys’ CEO Salil Parekh – at Rs 56 crore annual remuneration package. In FY22-23, Parekh earned Rs 6.67 crore in base pay, Rs 45 lakh in retiral benefits, Rs 18.73 crore in variable pay or bonus, and Rs 30.6 crore by exercising his RSUs.

The next-best paid CEO of an IT company is C Vijayakumar of HCLTech, earning Rs 28.4 crore in FY22-FY23. This includes Rs 16.44 crore as base salary, Rs 11.8 crore as performance-linked bonus, and Rs 24 lakh in benefits, perquisites, and allowances.

Vijayakumar's salary is expected to be even better in FY24 as HCLTech pays out the long-term incentive (LTI) at the end of two years. He will receive the LTI for FY21-22 and FY22-23 at the end of FY23-24.

After Vijayakumar, LTIMindtree pays the highest in the industry. Its CEO Debashis Chatterjee, who was appointed at the helm in November 2022 post the merger of L&T and Mindtree, drew Rs 17.5 crore in salary in FY22-23. Of this, Rs 8.5 crore was the fixed component, Rs 8.8 crore was variable pay, and Rs 16 lakh was by way of perquisites.

Next in line is Tech Mahindra’s Mohit Joshi, who will receive an annual fixed compensation of Rs 6.5 crore and an equal amount in annual variable pay. His variable pay in the first year is guaranteed. Additionally, he can get an annual overperformance bonus of up to 70 percent of his variable compensation. This takes the total to Rs 17.5 crore excluding ESOPs.

In addition, he will get one-time stock options worth Rs 20.6 crore, 60 percent of which will vest once he finishes a year with the company, and the remaining when he completes two years.

Further, he has stock options worth Rs 28.8 crore vesting in equal installments over three consecutive years of employment, the first installment vesting after the first year.

K Krithivasan, CEO of India’s top IT services company Tata Consultancy Services, will be paid a basic salary of Rs 10 lakh per month, which can go up to a maximum of Rs 16 lakh per month, per the company’s annual report. This takes the maximum basic salary to Rs 1.9 crore annually.

However, his commission will make up a bigger chunk of his remuneration, subject to company performance.