Happiest Minds to hire 300 in each of next three quarters

Bengaluru-based software firm Happiest Minds Technologies, which has been facing rising attrition levels of late, is planning to hire 300 techies in each of the next three quarters, its top management has said.

The Ashok Soota-promoted 11-year-old company had a high attrition of 14.7 per cent in the June quarter when its total headcount stood at 3,538, after net-adding 310 in the quarter to June.

Against this, market leader TCS had the lowest attrition of 8.6 per cent, (up from 7.2 per cent in March), followed by Infosys at 13.9 per cent (was up from 10.9 per cent in March); Wipro (15.5 per cent in June, up from 12 per cent in March), and the US-based Cognizant, which has two-thirds of its employees here, had 31 per cent for the June quarter.

However for Happiest Minds, on an annualised basis the employee retention level increased from 16.2 per cent in Q1 of FY'21 to 14.7 per cent now, but fell from Q4 of FY'21 when it was 12.4 per cent.

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"We plan to add 300 people in each of the next three quarters of this fiscal. Our net headcount stood at 3,538 as of the June quarter, after on-boarding 310 new people and we hope to maintain the pace of hiring in every quarter of the fiscal," Happiest Minds executive vice-chairman Joseph Anantharaju told PTI.

Managing director and chief financial officer Venkatraman Narayanan chipped in saying hiring is necessitated by both by attrition of those who have spent two-six years with the company and they bagging new jobs with huge hikes, and also to meet the rising demand which led to much higher utilisation level of the existing resources, which was marginally down to 82.1 per cent in Q1 from 82.6 per cent in Q4 of FY21.

"So I am ready to budget for a net addition of 300 people in each of the next three quarters. Hope my sales team follow suit," Narayanan said.

Happiest Minds, which went public in the thick of the first wave of the pandemic last September with a primary share sale that was oversubscribed by 151 times, gave over 562 per cent in returns to the shareholders since then, whose number went by 1.25 lakh since the listing when it had just 2 lakh public shareholders, Narayanan said.

Anantharaju attributed the higher margin of 25 per cent in the June quarter to the pandemic-driven savings by way of lower overhead cost, and the overall positive positive rub-off that the the IT industry got from the crisis. He said the energy bill is down by Rs 65 lakh a month, and there is also dip in rentals.

On the business mix, Narayanan said they are only listed software firm in the world with almost all -- 96 per cent -- its revenue coming in from the digital business with the cloud vertical contributing the highest at 42 per cent, automation 24 per cent, security 11 per cent, analytics 13 per cent and IoT 10 per cent.

Narayanan explained that the 29 per cent decline in net income to Rs 35.73 crore in the June 2021 quarter was primarily on a higher base -- a deferred tax credit of Rs 18 crore and a Rs 9.5 crore tax claw back in the year-ago period. Revenue grew 41.4 per cent to Rs 331.52 crore in the June quarter.