Sasmita Jena
Bengaluru, 22 July
Shiv Nadar-promoted HCLTech’s CEO, C Vijayakumar’s earned the highest salary among the top four Indian IT services firms at around Rs 84 crore ($10.06 million) during the last fiscal year, the company revealed in its annual report. This was an increase of 190% over the previous fiscal year.
The annual report released on Monday showed, Vijayakumar earned a base salary of around $1.96 million (Rs 16.4 crore), a performance-lined bonus of $1.14 million (Rs 9.5 crore); while around $2.36 million (Rs 19.7 crore) was paid in long-term incentive (LTI) cash component. The salary component also included $4.56 million (Rs 38.15 crore) in LTI – perquisite value of the RSUs (restricted stock units) exercised with the rest $0.04 million in benefits, perquisites and allowance.
During this period, Infosys CEO Salil Parekh witnessed a remuneration increase of over 16% to Rs 66 crore. Interestingly, TCS- the market leader in the Indian IT services space- saw its CEO K Krithivasan’s overall remuneration at Rs 25.2 crore. Though Wipro’s former CEO, Thierry Delaporte received a total compensation of $20 million (Rs 166 crore); a significant portion- Rs 92.1 crore was part of a severance-related package.
Most IT firms’ CEOs’ compensation increased in FY24 though these companies reported one of the lowest revenue growths in decades owing to slowdown in technology spending globally.
In the annual report, HCLTech’s Chairperson, Roshni Nadar Malhotra pointed out that generative AI (GenAI) has begun to make an impact as the world was witnessing use cases moving out of innovation labs to real business environments.
HCLTech’s CEO, Vijayakumar noted that the total contract value of new deals won (excluding renewals) was at an all-time high of $9.8 billion, a rise of 10% over the previous fiscal. The company won 73 new large deals out of which 36 in services and 37 were in software.
“The highlight of the year was our strategic partnership with Verizon Business. The Verizon deal win marked a major milestone as the largest services deal in HCLTech’s history and underscored our ability to engineer solutions and execute at scale,” the CEO of HCLTech said.