Key men at TCS get 31% pay hike, despite slowdown in IT industry

Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT firm, offered a more than 31 per cent hike in remuneration to its key managers at a time when the rest of the company's employees received average salary increase of around 10 per cent.

The IT services major declared its the performance-based hike in remuneration for the last financial year, the firm said in in its annual report for fiscal 2017.

Former chief executive officer N Chandrasekaran, who served as TCS CEO till February 21, 2017, earned more than Rs 30.15 crore including a large share of commission in last fiscal. Rajesh Gopinathan, who was elevated as the chief executive officer in February, earned Rs 6.2 crore in total compensation for the same period. Gopinathan served as the chief financial officer of the company till February 21.

N G Subramaniam, who became the chief operating officer since February, earned Rs 6.1 crore last fiscal.

Two other key persons in the company's executive team, Aarthi Subramanian, Executive Director and Suprakash Mukhopadhyay, Global Treasury Head and Company Secretary, were given more than 30 per cent increase. While Subramanian earned Rs 3.7 crore in last fiscal, Mukhopadhyay earned Rs 2.32 crore.

TCS, which reported 387,223 employees as on March 31, 2017, said its managerial remuneration for the year (FY17) went up by 31.38 per cent. However, the median remuneration for employees increased by 4.91 per cent.

Its rival Infosys also gave out significant hike to its key employees in total compensation including performance-based stock units. Nine top leaders received nearly 60 per cent.

The firm incurred an expenditure of Rs 107 crore towards stock compensation expenses, while this stock incentive plan covers approximately top 25 per cent of the mid to senior level employees.

While one of these leaders drew more than 100 per cent in FY17 over FY16, others got between 45 and 80 per cent hike in total compensation. The leaders who maxed their pay hikes are at executive vice president and president levels.

Salaries of key people at Indian IT companies increased sharply at a time when the industry is seeing slowest growth in a decade due to global uncertainties and disruption in business models owing to emergence of digital technologies such as cloud.