IT majors to hire over 50,000 in FY-07

By agencies   |   Wednesday, 12 April 2006, 19:30 IST
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MUMBAI: Top tier IT companies are likely to collectively recruit over 50,000 professionals in the financial year 2006-07. Last financial year saw the highest ever manpower addition by IT companies with top four infotech majors in the billion dollar club hiring close to 56,500 professionals. The trend is likely to continue in 2006-07 also. Hiring this financial year may be spread across multiple offshore destinations with significant manpower expansion also happening in low-cost locations such as Eastern Europe, South America, Philippines and China, a top official with a leading Indian IT firm indicated. With no sign of slackening in global IT spends and outsourcing trends, the official said companies were likely to continue with the aggressive hiring policy seen in financial year 2006. In 2005-06, Infosys Technologies had the maximum gross hires of 21,200 professionals. In comparison, the Bangalore-based firm had a net addition of only 11,116 employees in FY-05. Its employee strength at the end of December 2005 was 49,422 and 3,500 more people were slated to be hired in the fourth quarter. However, in terms of increase in headcount in financial year 2006, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) may be largest. The firm had 16,857 gross additions up to the third quarter of financial year 2006 and had projected 8,000 more additions in the fourth quarter. Of the 8,000 additions, 4,500 will come from its acquisition of Comicrom and Tata Infotech. The Infosys results announcement on April 14 is expected to throw more light on the future outlook for Indian software companies. However, analysts are not expecting any negative surprises in the demand situation and are projecting a growth of 25 percent to 30 percent for the top tier IT firms for the next three years. “We are bullish on all the large caps because they have better scalability,” said Harit Shah, an analyst with Equitymaster.com. Another analyst with a leading brokerage points out that although the investor community is awaiting the Infosys guidance to determine the direction of the industry in financial year 2007, the guidance given by the U.S.-headquartered Cognizant Technology Solutions shows demand for IT services continues to be strong.