Infosys will be giving its next salary hike in July 2021, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Salil Parekh said while announcing the company’s results for the final quarter of FY21. According to COO Pravin Rao, the quantum will be as per industry norms and the company will be targeting segments where attrition is higher.
Attrition for the quarter came in at 15.2%, up from 10.3% in Q3. The company saw a net addition of 10,307 employees. As on March 31, 2021, it has a total of 2,59,619 employees, of which 38.6% are women.
The company said it hired 21,000 freshers from campus in FY21, of whom 19,000 were from India) in the last year. In total, Infosys said it hired around 36,000 employees last year.
For FY22, Pravin Rao said Infosys is looking to hire over 25,000 freshers, which will include around 24,000 from India.
"In India we have a large number of college graduates that we can look at for recruitment but lateral recruitment will also continue. Demand environment is extremely strong, we believe we have the ability to recruit, train and fulfill that demand. We see quite an optimistic view,” Salil Parekh said.
Commenting on the high attrition levels, Pravin Rao said it was something the company anticipated and is a reflection of the strong demand in the market.
“Any interventions to retain some of our best talent we continue to do. Over the past year or so we have engaged our people, we provide a strong value proposition in terms of engagement and enablement, there is a lot of focus on continuous learning, a lot of important projects people get to work on, lot of career advancement opportunity and so on,” he said.
“Attrition is likely to remain at this level for the next one or two quarters given the demand,” he said.
With the pandemic continuing well into FY22, Salil Parekh said the company’s work from home approach is working well.
“What we have now learnt is that the onsite mix has moved significantly to offshore in the last financial year, much more rapidly than it had done in the last several years. We think some of this is the way clients are looking at the business,” he said.
He added that there will be a need to build up some social capital and some of that will be built when people come back to the office.
“There are two things at play - the hybrid model and the shift in the onsite offshore mix and the different ways we feel those will play out and we will see how it looks in the next few quarters and next few years,” he said.
In terms of capital expenditure, Chief Financial Officer Nilanjan Roy said that in FY21, the company pretty much shut down on infrastructure capex as everyone was working from home. This, he said, was repurposed into work from home enablement “which was about laptops, communications and security".
“Going into next year we think some of these projects will start back and we will continue to focus on enablement of work from home. There will be some ramp up of capex but it will be below pre-pandemic levels,” he added.
COO Pravin Rao said the company’s strategy is to be less dependent on visa, and is something Infosys has been working on for the last 2-3 years.
'Today, more than 69% of our US workforce are locals and so to that extent we are less and less dependent on the visa regime,” he said.
However, he added that early indications are that the Biden administration seems to be much more immigration friendly.
"We have seen many of the restrictions of the Trump administration being deferred or allowed to lapse. One of the amendments around compensation increases has also been put off by more than a year. It’s early days, it remains to be seen but from an Infosys perspective, we are less and less dependent on visas. We have a fairly robust model and a lot of focus on localisation,” he said.
The IT services major posted a 17.47% rise in net profit to Rs 5,076 crore for the March quarter, and announced up to Rs 9,200 crore buyback offer at a maximum price of Rs 1,750 per share.