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Amidst high attrition rates, Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI) onboarded over 10 per cent of its current workforce of 42,000 in the second quarter ended September 30. The company also updated its hiring target for the current fiscal to 5,500 college freshers, from 4,500 earlier . LTI’s last 12-month attrition rate stood at 19.6 per cent in Q2FY22, as compared to 15.2 per cent in Q1.
Sanjay Jalona, Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director, LTI told BusinessLine, “Today, we have 42,000 employees. We added 2,000 net new people in Q4FY21, 2,300 in Q1FY22 and this quarter alone we added 4,084 – that is 10 per cent of our total workforce being added in one quarter.”
Upskilling initiatives
He added, “There has been a talent shortage. It will take another 4-6 quarters, if not more, for the supply to come up. We have special initiatives for upskilling our own staff. We are now thinking on how to take non-tech talent, train them for six months and then absorb them as tech talent.”
LTI announced its results on Monday. The company’s net profit grew 20.77 per cent y-o-y to ₹551.7 crore in Q2FY22, against ₹456.8 crore reported in the same quarter last year. On a sequential basis, profit jumped 11.05 per cent from ₹496.8 crore in Q1. Meanwhile, revenue from operations stood at ₹3,767 crore, growing 25.6 per cent y-o-y from ₹2,998.4 crore in Q2FY21. It went up by 8.8 per cent q-o-q.
“Supply-side constraints and what is being called the great resignation is a big challenge. There is a worldwide shortage of talent not only for IT companies but for our customers as well. We are struggling with double-digit attrition rates globally. The US has 10.5 million job openings and only 7.5 million workforces is available, and post-Covid, a lot of employees are rethinking whether to join back. This problem has created a need for automation of those jobs. That’s why the entire IT industry had growth in business too due to this demand,” Jalona said.
Testing 5G tech
Unlike its bigger peers such as TCS and Tech Mahindra, which are partnering with other hardware manufacturers for a comprehensive 5G network offering, LTI might explore the technology from a data gathering and analytics purview, going way beyond just telecom use.
Jalona said, “5G will help every vertical do things differently. For instance, media and entertainment will be able to offer more products as rendering speed would increase. Automated cars would be on roads as it will be faster to talk with. 5G as technology will help in easing a lot of processes beyond telecom. It will increase the speed of these technologies and in turn help in creating a lot of data. That’s where we want to play in a meaningful way in data.”
When asked if LTI will be outsourcing hardware manufacturing, he added, “No partner is off the table but frankly today, the world is moving towards an open architecture where everyone is sharing their APIs, including for equipment and devices in a defined manner. What one needs to do is to pick it up quickly and make sense of the data. With the DNA we inherited from L&T, we can get a lot of information on physical devices and the convergence of physical and digital devices will become a lot easier for us.”