India’s second-largest IT services firm Infosys while announcing its quarterly results also said that it will roll out salary hikes and promotions across all levels effective January 1. Infosys is also giving 100 per cent variable pay, along with a special incentive for the second quarter.
“Recognising the continuing stellar commitment from our employees during these times, we are paying out variable pay for the quarter at 100 per cent. We will pay a one-time special incentive in Q3 for our junior employees,” Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh said during a virtual briefing.
The salary hike process will restart now and will be effective on January 1, 2021, he added.
“We restarted promotions in the last quarter at our junior levels, and this will now be expanded to all our levels,” Parekh said.
Besides, the Bengaluru-based company plans to hire about 15,000 freshers from campuses next year.
Infosys COO Pravin Rao said the quantum of salary hikes will be identical to those seen in the previous years.
In the September 2020 quarter, Infosys added 975 people (net) to take its headcount to 2,40,208 employees. Its voluntary attrition for IT services on an annualised basis declined to 7.8% as compared to 18.3% in the year-ago period.
Rao said in this quarter, Infosys had about 5,500 additions of which roughly 3,000 were freshers and about 2,500 were laterals.
“…for this year, we are looking at 16,500 freshers in India joining us and hiring has started for next year and we are probably looking at 15,000,” he added.
Rao said attrition has come down significantly than what is typically seen around this time of the year.
He added that this was on account of multiple factors, including the steps taken by the IT major towards employee engagement and safety during the pandemic.
Infosys Ltd also raised its annual revenue growth forecast on Wednesday as it posted a better-than-expected quarterly profit, buoyed by growth in demand for its digital services during the pandemic.
The Bengaluru-headquartered company said it expected annual revenue in the financial year to end-March 2021 to grow between 2% and 3% in constant currency terms versus the previous year, from an earlier expectation of revenue being flat to up 2%.
“There is lot of focus on enabling a remote place of working, a lot of focus on accelerated digital transformation, a lot of focus on migrating workflows to the cloud,” said Pravin Rao, the chief operating officer at Infosys, which provides services such as cloud, data and analytics to global clients.
Infosys, which typically used H-1B visas to connect U.S. businesses with thousands of foreign engineers and programmers, has stepped up local hiring in the past three years and is ready to meet any challenges arising from changes to the U.S. visa regime, Rao said.
