BENGALURU: India’s second largest IT services company, Infosys, has temporarily suspended hiring, salary hikes as well as promotions as part of its cost-optimisation drive amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The firm, however, said it will honour all campus and lateral job offers that have been already made. Besides, there will be only performance-based exits and no COVID-19 related layoff, the Bengaluru-headquartered company said on Monday.

“We are going to onboard 35,000 trainees in FY21 as per routine exercise. We also plan to return to offices in a phased manner. Only 5% of the workforce will join offices for the initial four weeks. We may also set up testing facilities at our campuses to ensure health and safety of our employees,” Infosys, COO, UB Pravin Rao said.

The IT behemoth, which reported a three per cent decline in the net profit at Rs 4,335 crore quarter-on-quarter and a marginal increase in revenue by 0.8 per cent sequentially to Rs 23,267 crore, said it is unable to give revenue guidance for FY21 due to uncertainty arising out of the COVID pandemic. On a consolidated basis, the IT bellwether reported a 6.3 per cent rise and operating margin for Q4 was 21.1 per cent as against 21.4 per cent in Q4FY19.

According to Infosys CEO Salil Parekh, the COVID-19 impact will be seen on the company’s financials in the short term, however the firm may tide over the storm because of its $3.6 billion strong liquidity. “In fact, some of our big deal signings took place in the last weeks of March quarter and even in April. Our large deal size in Q4 FY20 stood at $1.65 billion.

We are also re-aligning as per our client demands as we now see more focus towards cloud, virtualization, remote work software and cost cutting measures.

We are helping the clients address these needs in the new environment,” he added. Parekh noted that business disruption is expected to be seen across all verticals including financial, retail and manufacturing. “There will be some sort of recessionary environment in the near term. We will accordingly employ our playbook to manage challenges in the near term,” he added.