HUL's CEO designate Jawa to be paid ₹21 crore in FY24

Rohit Jawa, who will succeed Sanjiv Mehta as CEO of Hindustan Unilever next month, will take home annual remuneration of ₹21.43 crore and another ₹4.83 crore as mobility-linked allowances in FY24, the consumer products giant said in its annual report. Mehta, who will retire on June 26 after the company's annual general meeting, received ₹22.36 crore in annual remuneration in 2022-23, almost the same as the previous year, the report said. Mehta's salary last year was 164 times higher than the average of the remuneration of HUL employees, it said. HUL said it reported a strong performance last fiscal year in a challenging macroeconomic environment.

"As economic activities normalised after a couple years of the pandemic, in a high inflationary environment, we witnessed consumers prioritising essentials over discretionary spends," Mehta said in the annual report.

HUL had 6,697 permanent employees as on March 31, 2023, against 8,480 a year earlier. The company clarified that last year's number includes employees working for HUL only while the FY22 number included those working with subsidiaries and group companies. The percentage increase in the median remuneration of employees for FY23 was 10.73%, report said. "We completed ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit underlying sales growth and in the financial year, added nearly ₹8,000 crore to our turnover, despite a...high-inflationary external environment," HUL chairman Nitin Paranjpe said in the report.