Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Friday, Sep 05, 2003
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Friday, Sep 05, 2003 |
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Info-Tech
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Human Resources Cognizant to add 2,300 staff by year-end Our Bureau
Chennai , Sept. 4 COGNIZANT Technology Solutions plans to end the calendar year 2003 with about 9,000 employees, a majority of them in India. It closed the June quarter with around 6,700 employees even as it expects to exceed its earlier guidance of at least $354 million for 2003. The company's Chairman and CEO, Mr Kumar Mahadeva, at the Smith Barney Citigroup Technology Conference in New York has said, "due to the unprecedented demand environment that we currently experience, we are also doing significant lateral hiring today. The current pace of hiring is about 100 people per week. Our hiring is back-end loaded in the year. This is consistent with what we did last year where we added close to 2,000 people in the third and fourth quarter. We would do a similar thing this year. We would bring in about 1,000 people from the campus (in India) during the second half of this year," he said. Cognizant is targeting an operating margin of 19-20 per cent, and the company would re-invest anything above 20 per cent back into its business, he said. Mr Mahadeva said infrastructure outsourcing was seeing strong growth and there has been some growth in BPO (business process outsourcing), ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), data warehousing and business intelligence. Cognizant has invested about $40-million in infrastructure in India. The company finished the first phase of construction of six-lakh sq. ft. space to house 6,000 people in India, and the programme would be completed in October, he said. On new deals, Mr Mahadevan said, the company's pricing has been flat over the last eight quarters or so. There have been no price negotiations from customers and therefore no price deteriorations.
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