Spends $150 million on hiring in India, annually.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW DELHI: US-based IT powerhouse IBM leads all other companies in its industry when it comes to spending on IT contract hiring in India, nearly doubling other major IT companies that placed second in the rankings.
The news comes from a report that was published by a leading staffing agency that chose not to be named, reports The Times of India. According to the findings, IBM spends more than $150 million per year on hiring contract workers from India, a sum that accounts for over 15% of the company’s total worldwide workforce.
By comparison, the companies that placed second on the list – Accenture, Microsoft, and Cisco, all of which are known to hire in large quantities from India – spend about $80 million each on contract IT workers from the subcontinent. Cognizant, HCL Technologies, and Oracle lie in the $50 million to $80 million annual range. The $30 million to $50 million bracket includes Tech Mahindra and Wipro, while Infosys is only at “Up to $30 million” per year, said the report published on Monday.
Contract hiring in the IT sector is big business, and is generally done by the big companies to help supplement their full-time IT staff with short-term hires. These extension teams help companies when big project deadlines are coming up, and are generally outsourced to countries like China and India. These workers are hired by staffing agencies, which contract with IBM and other large corporations for this very reason.
The news that IBM does so much contract hiring in India is not necessarily a surprise, however. Last year, it was revealed that the IT giant employs more people in India than it does in the US, where it is actually based. The company has about 150,000 employees in India, a sizeable portion of its roughly 430,000 employees around the world; in fact, the actual percentage is about 35%.
Meanwhile, the company’s current US-based workforce is estimated to be only around 83,000, or about 19% of its total global sum. Although IBM has not released the number of contract workers it has in India, the Times report estimates that it would be somewhere around 22,000 workers, meaning that about 15% of IBM’s India-based workforce was hired on a contract basis.
Meanwhile, India’s IT staffing market has grown into a $1.2 billion annual industry, while the worldwide value of IT staffing has hit close to $180 billion. India continues to be an attractive source of workers for American IT companies, as they can hire Indians – either via outsourcing, or bringing them to the US on work visas – for far less than US workers.
IBM has not commented on the contract IT worker numbers.