Bangalore: Infosys Technologies, bellwether of the Indian infotech industry, announced sobering results on Wednesday that reflected the worsening global downturn. For the first time ever, the company announced a 1.8% drop in revenues in dollar terms in the quarter-ended March 31. Worse, it has forecast a 6.7% drop in dollar revenues in the current year starting April.

Thanks, however, to the sharp depreciation in the rupee over the last one year, the company reported a 24.1% rise in rupee revenues in January-March, 2009, compared to the corresponding quarter of 2007-08.

The company is tightening its belts in anticipation of a difficult future. It has skipped its annual wage hike altogether. In 2002, it had delayed a wage hike by six months. Infosys will also not be making any campus offers this year and will approach engineering institutions only in the last quarter, i.e. January-March 2010.

Human resources director TV Mohandas Pai predicted that 200,000 people will leave the IT sector in 2009-10 against a normal induction of 3-3.5 lakh employees. “Of the two lakh people who will leave this year, 1.5 lakh will leave voluntarily. They may leave for higher studies or because they are getting married,” he said.

“We will hire 18,000 people in 2009-10. Of these, 16,000 will be freshers and 2,000 will be hired laterally. This lateral hiring will be split into 1,000 from abroad and 1,000 from India and South-East Asian countries,” said Pai.

To trim operational costs, Infosys is also cutting variable pay, which constitutes a large chunk of salaries. For instance, the top layer of executives in Infosys was paid only 58% of variable pay in the fourth quarter of 2008-09.

source: DNAINdia

Tags: forecast, indian market, infosys, news, sensex

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