While India’s second largest IT services company, Infosys proved most of the analysts wrong by showing a year on year increase of 1.4% in profits, its net hiring in the quarter ended June 30, 2017 was negative, as a result of higher attrition. The company says higher attrition was a seasonal trend and will continue in the next quarter as well.
The company employed a headcount of 1,98,553 employees, down almost 1% from 2,00,364 employees on March 31, 2017. During the quarter, the company added 8,645 people to its headcount. However, the attrition at the company increased 22.59%, compared with the last quarter.
Infosys CEO and MD Vishal Sikka explained to DH what led to this development. Edited excerpts:
What has been the impact of local hiring and automation on your business?
As a result of automation, we have released more than 3,600 people in the first quarter. But what is more important is the adoption of our Nia platform. Also the development of tools and tecchniques in our projects is important. The cumulative result of this is that our revenue per employee is almost $52,000 right now.
How do you deal with employees who have been benched, in a scenario when you are training them for automation?
Even in this quarter, though our net headcount decreased slightly, we did hire more than 8,600 Infoscions in the course of this quarter. But this is more because of seasonality. The hiring is going on but it is the rate of growth that is going down. But we do expect to add more people to the company in the coming days. The important thing to keep in mind is that the advances in the automation technology, we have to move towards the next generation jobs, towards new areas of opportunities and building new skills for that. And training your existing employees for these new skills. So last quarter we trained 3,000 people on AI technology and of that 2,100 on our Nia platform. We have trained more than 1.4 lakh people on design thinking. So these are all steps we are taking to take our employees ahead of this automation curve. To help our employees get much more innovative.
You recently had a meeting with Rodríguez Calderón, governor of Mexican state of Nuevo León. Are you planning to shift some of your US operations to Mexico?
We have a Mexican subidiary. Yes we had met the Governor. But the US is more than 60% of our business and it is growing. There is no shortage of the opportunity there.
You are emphasising on the localistion in the US? Are you planning something on the similar lines in the Europe?
The local hiring is not so much because of the visa regulations, but in response to the work that is changing and how clients are expecting technologies to take shape in new kinds with local people working in the hun, augmented by the global talent.
What is the progress on the Virtual Global Delivery System?
It is something we continue to work on, to create new work environment
Published 15 July 2017, 19:04 IST