The headcount of one of the IT major, Cognizant in India dropped by 8,000 in 2017, to a total of 180,000, according to the company’s latest filing with the US SEC.
The headcount of one of the IT major, Cognizant in India dropped by 8,000 in 2017, to a total of 180,000, according to the company’s latest filing with the US SEC.
Besides being the gigantic decline, this is a first huge fall for the firm in India.
In 2016, the total headcount of the firm in India was of 38,500.
In the SEC filing, Cognizant said it incurred $53 million in severance costs, including those related to the voluntary separation programme.
Last month, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) predicted that revenue growth in the information technology (IT) and BPO sector in the coming fiscal would remain almost flat at 7%-9% even as hiring would fall by 30%-50% compared to the current fiscal.
R Chandrasekhar, president of the IT industry association, said that the sector could end with a 7.8% growth in the current fiscal.
"In terms of export revenues we expect growth rate of 7%-9%. We expect the change to be positive and this is the band we see it happening. In the domestic revenue also, we expect a slight upswing to 10%-12% in the year ahead. The key trend is that the new-age digital is expected to grow at 1.5-2 times the growth in the rest of the revenue segment and domestic technology is now poised to be a double digit. The Indian market is increasingly driven by enterprise digital adoption and consumers becoming tech savvy," he said on the sidelines of Nasscom's leadership summit in Hyderabad.
On the jobs front, the lobby body estimated the IT sector to hire one lakh people in the coming fiscal compared to the projected 1.3-1.5 lakh people this fiscal.
Many HR experts believe that even the conservative IT job number given by Nasscom seemed propped up considering that most IT firms were moving towards higher automation and productivity by looking at higher revenue per headcount. The last few years have seen the revenue to job ratio only moving southwards. Meaning, employment growth in the IT sector has not been proportional to revenue growth.
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 "Cognizant's India headcount goes down by 8,000 in 2017")
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