Indian IT Outsourcing Firms Plan To Keep Staff With Double-Digit Salary Raises

People needed include those skilled in a variety of enterprise applications, including SAP, PeopleSoft and Siebel; IT architects and database administrators; and project managers

When publicly traded companies report financial results, executives typically also provide future guidance, such as the number of new customers they expect for the coming year or revenue expectations.
Two of India 's leading IT outsourcing firms have added another category to future performance guidance: the size of the salary raises they expect to give.
Faced with the constant threat of losing the best workers to the competition, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Technologies have told company stakeholders that they plan to give India-based employees raises of 12% to 15% in the coming year.
Tata reported Monday net income of $950 million for its fiscal year ended March 31, up 43% from last year. Revenue was $4.3 billion, up 41%. The company also bragged about a comparably low employee attrition rate of 11.3% for the year. It hired 32,462 people, kept 22,750 of those hires, and ended the fiscal year with 89,419 employees, for a net increase of about 30%.
In a press conference Monday in Mumbai, Tata's head of global human resources, S. Padmanabhan , added that Tata has a "planned wage inflation" of 12% to 15% for India-based workers in the coming year, according to The Hindu newspaper and other regional media outlets.
Infosys gave the exact same range for wage increases when it announced its financial results on April 14, and like Tata, retained just about two out of three people it hired in the fiscal year. The company reported an attrition rate of 13.7% and said it hired 30,946 employees during the year, but kept 19,526, for a workforce of 72,241 by year's end. Infosys said revenue increased 44% year over year to $3.09 billion, and net income climbed 53% to $850 million.
Even with salary increases of 15%, India-based IT professionals still command much lower salaries than their U.S. counterparts. An IT pro in India might draw a raise of $4,500 on a $30,000 a year salary, but that's still far less than a U.S. tech employee earns.
It's getting harder for all companies doing business in India to hire and keep the number of employees they need to meet booming demand. Accenture plans to increase its India staff this year by 8,000 people to 35,000, surpassing its U.S. employee base. IBM's India staff has jumped from 43,000 to 53,000 in six months, and it expects to continue growing at that pace. People needed include those skilled in a variety of enterprise applications, including SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel; IT architects and database administrators; and project managers and other leaders.