Two India-origin persons among Forbes top-paid young CEOs list

Two Indian origin businessmen - publishing software giant Adobe's Shantanu Narayen and global outsourcing major Cognizant's Francisco D'Souza - have made to the league of young CEOs with fattest pay package in the US, as per a list compiled by Forbes.

Narayen has been ranked at the 5th and D'Souza at the 15th position in a list of 15 young CEOs, aged 45 or less. The list, published in the online edition of the US business magazine, has been topped by a person of Pakistani origin Nabeel Gareeb, who is the CEO of chipmaker MEMC Electronic Materials since April 2002.

In terms of age, D'Souza is the youngest of the 15 CEOs at 39. Gareeb is aged 43 and Narayen is 44, the report said.

However, Gareeb tops the list with an annual pay package of 79.6 million dollars, as against 12 million dollars of Narayen, who is the CEO of Adobe Systems since December 2007.

The annual total compensation for D'Souza, the CEO of Cognizant Technology since January 2007, has been put at 3.7 million dollars.

Gareeb is followed by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (45.9 million dollars) at the second, SL Green CEO Marc Holliday (30 million dollars) at the third and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz (13.5 million dollars) at the fourth place.

Noting that "young chief executives are becoming an endangered species", the report said that the number of CEOs aged 45 or less at the 500 largest listed companies in the US has dropped by more than half to 28 from 60 at the time of tech boom in 2000.