Infosys on Wednesday, July 14 announced that it would be hiring roughly 35,000 college graduates in FY22 while announcing its results for the first quarter of the year. Out of this, it has already hired 10,000 people during the first quarter.
The IT services giant reported a 22.7% rise in profit for the quarter, to Rs 5,195 crore from Rs 4,233 crore a year ago, which was slightly below estimates. It signed large deals worth $2.6 billion, and an operating margin of 23.7%, up 1% year-on-year and down 0.8% sequentially. Infosys saw year-on-year growth go up by 16.9% which it said is the fastest growth it has seen in 10 years, and sequential growth of 4.8%. Infosys's digital revenues stood at 53.9% of total revenues, a year-on-year constant currency growth of 42.1%, the filing said.
With growth at the fastest pace in a decade in the first quarter, Infosys revised its growth guidance up to 14-16%, said CEO Salil Parekh. “We remain confident of delivering on the margin guidance, underpinned by our comprehensive cost optimisation programme, despite increasing cost headwinds arising largely from compensation review, talent acquisition and retention," said Nilanjan Roy, Chief Financial Officer.
The company has a headcount of 2,67,953 as of June 30, 2021, a net addition of 8,334 from the last quarter. Voluntary attrition during the quarter was at 13.9%, up from 10.9% last quarter. And 38.8% of all employees are women.
“As the demand for digital talent explodes, rising attrition in the industry poses a near-term challenge. We plan to meet this demand by expanding our hiring programme of college graduates for FY 22 to ~35,000 globally”, said COO Pravin Rao. He said that they have already recruited over 10,000 people in this quarter.
“In some sense, it [attrition] is an area of concern but it is also a reflection of high demand environment out there and shortage of supply. We expect the situation to continue for a couple of quarters till supply catches up,” he added.
To retain employees, Rao said they already had one compensation increase in January and the second one is effective July. “We have increased promotions and there is a significant focus on retention and there are a lot of employee engagement initiatives, focus on career opportunities, etc,” he said.
Pravin Rao added that 98% of employees globally work from home, and 99% in India. “Close to 58% of employees have had at least one dose of vaccination and about 10% have had both the doses,” he said. In other markets, he said the percentage of vaccinated employees is higher.
He said that the company has administered over 2.3 lakh doses to 1.2 lakh plus employees and the remaining being dependents. In addition, he said the company has placed an order for over 5 lakh doses.
The new Income Tax portal developed by Infosys has seen various problems, with Nirmala Sitharaman asking the company to address the issues. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held a review meeting with the company as well and reportedly told the company to fix glitches “without further loss of time, improve their services, redress grievances on priority as it was impacting taxpayers adversely".
Rao said the company is working to address the issues raised, and some pertaining to performance and stability have been addressed.
“On an average, we have 8-10 lakh people signing on to the portal for various activities...Today we have about 10 lakh ITRs filed so far, yesterday we had 1 lakh ITRs filed in a single day. We have about 1.6 lakh DSC registration, close to 2 lakh statutory forms filed, 31000 e-proceeding forms submitted. We have been able to address around 63.5 lakh Aadhaar-PAN linking requests and so on,” COO Pravin Rao said.
He added that they have made some progress but things to do are still pending and issues need to be addressed and new functionalities need to be rolled out as well.
“We have to address some of the intermittent issues we continue to face in some of the functionalities that are available and have to roll out new functionalities as well. We are working collaboratively with the Income Tax department and other stakeholders [such as Chartered Accountant associations] and it is our endeavour to address these issues as expeditiously as possible. We have also added more bandwidth and invested in much more leadership and this is the single largest priority for us today and we are hopeful to address the remaining concerns and roll out remaining functionalities in due course,” he said.
He said the company will eventually do a post mortem to look at what went wrong.