Tech Mahindra CEO Mohit Joshi out-earns TCS, Wipro bosses with Rs 67.5 crore pay

MUMBAI: Mohit Joshi, chief executive of Tech Mahindra, took home Rs 67.5 crore in FY26, a tidy 11.7 per cent jump on the year before, and enough to vault him past two of the country’s biggest IT bosses in one clean stroke. The fifth-largest Indian IT services company’s annual report lays out the numbers, and they make for a striking read in an industry not exactly short of eye-watering pay cheques.

Translated into British pounds, Joshi’s haul breaks down into a salary of £1.36 million, performance-linked pay and bonus of £1.11 million, and stock-option gains of £2.93 million. Every rupee of the variable slice, the company insists, was tied to targets set by the nomination and remuneration committee, no discretionary top-ups, no soft landings.

That figure puts Joshi comfortably ahead of Wipro’s Srinivas Pallia, who earned Rs 45 crore in FY26, and well clear of Tata Consultancy Services’ K Krithivasan, on Rs 28 crore. But the pecking order has a ceiling above him too: Infosys’s Salil Parekh pocketed Rs 82.6 crore in FY26, while HCLTech’s C Vijayakumar still holds the industry’s high-water mark, Rs 94.6 crore in FY25.

The gap between boardroom and shop floor tells its own story. Tech Mahindra’s annual report puts Joshi’s pay at 1,085.27 times that of the median employee, even as median employee remuneration slipped 4.89 per cent over the same year. The company employed 119,337 people at the end of FY26. Group chairman Anand Mahindra, by contrast, drew a comparatively modest Rs 1.52 crore.

In his shareholder message, Mahindra cast artificial intelligence as opportunity rather than threat, arguing that AI will reshape the industry, alter the economics of software and services, and challenge old models, while opening up one of the largest opportunities the sector has ever seen.

Joshi framed FY26 as the year the company shifted from stabilisation to acceleration, with FY27 now pivoting to execution, operational discipline and a climb towards higher-value services. Project Fortius, the multi-year turnaround plan launched in April 2024, remains the spine of that strategy.

The underlying business backs up the swagger. Revenue for FY26 came in at Rs 56,815 crore, up 7.2 per cent on Rs 52,988 crore the year before. Net profit climbed 13.2 per cent to Rs 4,811 crore, while operating margin expanded by 290 basis points to 12.6 per cent. Large-deal bookings heading into FY27 are at their highest in more than a decade, with consulting and global capability centre services tipped as the next growth frontier.

Management is not getting carried away, though. Clients, the company warned, are likely to stay selective on long-term technology spending in FY27 as they wait for macroeconomic clarity before signing big cheques. The order book may be swelling, the report cautioned, but the conversion from booking to billed revenue could slow as the wider geo-economic picture stays unsettled.

Generative AI is now stitched into 90-95 per cent of engagements across Tech Mahindra’s largest accounts, and the company is betting its future on AI-led services anchored by its agentic platform, Orion. It also claims a singular distinction: the only IT services firm in the IndiaAI Mission, building sovereign AI muscle through Project Indus, a Hindi-first language model expanding into a broader Indic-language foundation model, and Project Garuda, a proprietary generative AI effort out of its Makers Lab research arm.

Joshi has the pay packet of a turnaround chief and the targets to match. Whether Rs 67.5 crore buys patience as well as performance is the question FY27 will answer, and the rest of the industry will be watching the scoreboard just as closely as the shareholders.