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Inofsys CEO Vishal Sikka

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BANGALORE: Infosys has raised the salaries of its top executives so sharply that some of them are now in the $1-million (Rs 6-crore) compensation club – making them almost unpoachable by even international rivals – and raising the salary benchmark in the Indian IT industry.The executive vice-presidents who are now at the Rs 6-crore level had salaries in the Rs 1.2-Rs 2 crore range previously, meaning that they have got three to five-fold hikes.The move comes as newly appointed CEO Vishal Sikka seeks to revitalize the demoralized company and stem the flood of exits, and brings in senior executives from his erstwhile employer, SAP , at salaries that Infosys has largely been unused to.Navnit Singh, MD of executive search firm Korn/Ferry India, says it is a retention strategy to make the senior executives less vulnerable to competition. “If you look at salaries of some of the global companies, they are comparable to what Infosys has done,” he said.“It’s a golden handcuff,” said a senior executive in the company who did not want to be named. When contacted, Infosys said it would disclose the details in its statutory filings, “as appropriate in due course”.Considering that Indian executives are seen increasingly as great candidates for global companies, HR experts say the new salaries are warranted. Former Wipro co-CEO Suresh Vaswani is on Dell’s board and management team, and former Infosys president BG Srinivas is group managing director and executive director of Hong Kong-based telecom and media giant PCCW.In the period immediately preceding Sikka’s arrival at Infosys, Srinivas and former consulting head Stephen Pratt had compensations of over $1 million. Now, at least five of the existing executives, and some of the new appointees from SAP, are said to be in that bracket. The salaries of other top executives, too, are said to have been raised significantly.In June, the $8.2-billion IT-services company elevated 12 senior VPs to executive VPs, and gave some of them new roles. Among these are Sandeep Dadlani, head of retail, CPG and logistics, and head of Americas; Rajesh Krishnamurthy, head of energy, communications & services and resources & utilities, and head of Europe; Mohit Joshi, head of financial services, and head of Brazil and Mexico; Sanjay Jalona, head of high-tech & manufacturing and engineering services; and Manish Tandon, head of life sciences and services in North America. Many of these are over $1-billion businesses.An HR executive who does not want to be named says the company needs to reduce the differential in the salaries of Sikka and the rest. Sikka came in as the highest paid professional CEO of an Indian company, drawing a salary of $5.08 million (Rs 30 crore). This includes a base salary of $9,00,000 and a variable pay of $4.18 million that is subject to the company achieving certain fiscal milestones.GC Jayaprakash, executive director in RGF Executive Search, says the standard practice in the IT industry is to offer substantial variable pays at top levels.So while the Infosys top execs would have received a significant increase in their fixed salaries, the much larger increment would be in bonuses and variable pay. “This ensures that the current structure does not become too imbalanced, and most of the payments happen depending on how the company and the individual performs,” the HR executive says.Another HR executive who does not want to be named says: “By the end of this exercise, I expect the top 300 executives in Infosys will see role expansions, reorganization of their career tracks and significant increases in their compensation.”