It will be a mixed bag for chief executives of Indian companies when it comes to increments for the coming financial year, says a compensation and benefits study for top management done by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

Increments for CEOs in the pharmaceutical & chemical and financial services sectors are predicted to be marginally better for 2003-4 over 2002-03. CEOs in engineering companies can expect slightly lower increases over 2002-03 while those who head consumer goods companies can expect substantially lower salary jumps.

Thus, CEOs of pharmaceutical & chemical companies can hope to see their salaries rise by 11.50 per cent this time against 11.25 per cent in 2002-03, while CEOs of financial services companies can expect a 7.5 per cent rise compared with 6.7 per cent in 2002-03.

On the other hand, the salary hike projected for CEOs of engineering companies is 8.4 per cent compared with 10 per cent for 2002-03. CEOs of consumer goods companies are projected to get a salary revision of 11.5 per cent for 2003-04 compared with an increase of 19 per cent for 2002-03. All estimates factor in inflation at 4.5 per cent.

However, functional heads in the consumer goods, chemicals and pharmaceuticals and financial services sectors can all look forward to better increments for 2003-04, while those in the engineering sector are likely to get lower increments, the Mercer study says.

Functional heads in consumer goods companies have been projected to get a salary revision of 13 per cent for 2003-04 compared with 11.75 per cent for 2002-03.

Functional heads in pharmaceutical & chemical companies can expect a salary revision of 11.13 per cent (11.1 per cent for 2002-03).

For functional heads in financial services, a revision of 7.71 per cent (6.07 per cent for 2002-03) has been projected.

For the functional heads of engineering companies, a salary hike of 8.14 per cent has been projected for 2003-04 (10.46 per cent in 2002-03).

"The economic slowdown continued in 2002-03 with the GDP growth rate estimated at 5.2 per cent. Inflation has come down since 2001 and is estimated at 4.5 per cent for 2002-03. As a result, expectations and projections for salary hikes are down this year compared with last year," said Mercer HR Consulting (India) Pvt Ltd country head R Sankar.

In November last year, Mercer had said that salaries  across various functions would go up by an average 9 per cent during the coming financial year, 2003-04, against the average hike of 10 per cent the corporate world took home at the beginning of the current financial year.