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Wipro, the Indian IT services and consulting group, says it plans to “aggressively” expand its US workforce, as it seeks to localise its operations and counter political opposition in the world’s largest economy to offshore outsourcing.
The outsourcing of work to companies such as Wipro, and the granting of work visas to foreign workers, including Indians, has long been of concern to US labour unions and is likely to become a political ‘hot potato’ in the upcoming presidential election.
The Indian information technology services industry, which accounts for the bulk of offshore outsourcing undertaken by US companies, has sought to reverse its negative image as an industry that takes away jobs from the country, particularly at a time of high unemployment.
Instead, the Indian IT sector is trying to present itself as a job creator. Wipro said it plans to expand its 8,700-strong US workforce through acquisitions and taking on new staff.
Like other Indian companies such as Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, Wipro seeks to use the time ahead of the upcoming election – when state and federal governments are keen to woo voters – to negotiate tax breaks and land acquisitions for new facilities.
Azim Premji, the chairman and majority owner of the company, told the Financial Times that Wipro would establish two new software-development facilities in the US in the near future, staffed primarily by Americans.
At Wipro’s development centre in Atlanta, 90 per cent of its 800 employees are local hires and the company aims to duplicate this success elsewhere.
“In the US, we are aggressively localising,” Mr Premji said. “We are evaluating two more centres in the US, hoping to set up scenarios similar to Atlanta. We will make a call on this in the next three months, absolute maximum.”
Mr Premji, who has a personal fortune of $13bn and is the third wealthiest Indian according to Forbes magazine, plans to expand Wipro’s local hiring across the world over the next few years to ensure that at least half of those employed by Wipro overseas are from the host country. Currently, 38 per cent of Wipro’s workforce outside India are locals. Bangalore-based Wipro employs a total of 130,000 people globally.
“Hiring salaries of locals are not any more expensive than the hiring of talent from India,” Mr Premji said. “You do not have the back and forth of transfer expenses.”
TCS, India’s largest IT company by sales, announced the opening of a new unit in Silicon Valley last month, while Infosys, which is second in size after TCS, has hired about 2,000 Americans in the past two years and is now looking to hire about 500 locals in the first three months of this year alone. Similarly, HCL Technologies plans to create 10,000 US and European jobs.
Mr Premji added that Wipro – which has operations in 45 countries across the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific – has an aggressive acquisition pipeline globally. Wipro is looking at buying companies with expertise in analytics, cloud, mobility and “big data” – the collection and processing of large amounts of customer data – particularly in industries such as healthcare, financial solutions, energy and utilities, which he sees as high-growth sectors.
He said Wipro still has scope to expand in northern Europe, particularly France and Germany. Sector analysts have said the ongoing debt crisis is providing attractive valuations for Indian IT companies looking for potential acquisition targets in the continent.
Source:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d6fe9894-51a0-11e1-a9d7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1llILQk4A
