Sikka himself is a US citizen.
Despite the stocks of Infosys falling alarmingly last week after the introduction of a new bill that aims at reforming the H-1B visa policies, the Indian IT firm registered a Q3 net rise of 2.3%.
The rise in the Q3 revenue is against the earlier estimate of Street that had estimated a much lower figure. Despite the rise in the earning, what projected in the press meet of the Infosys CEO was the questions regarding the recent bill introduced in the US congress.
Vishal Sikka, the CEO of Infosys said that the impact the new visa regime can be only gauged depending on the nature of policy when it is enacted. He also added that the Indian outsourcing firm is not overly concerned about the visa issue.
Sikka said he himself is a US citizen and the company has been focusing on hiring local talents for the last many years and he himself is one such hire.
“I am myself a senior local hire – a US citizen!” Mr. Sikka said in response to a question on the visa impact.
He added: “There will be need for significantly higher embrace of local talent. This is something that I have been focusing on since I started. I am myself a local hire and I am a US citizen. So, we are absolutely committed to creating US jobs, similarly in Australia, in Europe and other geographies where we operate in.â€
“Regardless of visa policy, the right thing to do for innovation is to have a lot of rich local talent. That is something we always believed in,†he said.
Sikka also shared his hopes about the Trump administration despite its proposed visa policy change aimed at bringing jobs back to Americans. Sikka said Donald Trump is otherwise “friendly towards business and entrepreneurship.”
“I feel that Donald Trump’s will be a business-friendly administration. If you see Mr. Trump’s own career and life, he has been an innovator, entrepreneur, and businessman. So I expect his administration will be run on those priorities. At Infosys too, we have an innovation-friendly environment. Overall, I expect that if you can continue delivering value and focus on innovation things will be OK. So far there has been no discernible pattern in client behavior,” Mr. Sikka said.
The H-1B visa bill reintroduced in the Congress has two key provisions, which would dramatically alter legal immigration to the US: it would raise salary requirement for H-1B visa positions to $100,000/year (up from $60,000/year currently) and require successful candidates to have a master’s degree from accredited institutions as determined by the Department of Homeland Security.
The rules, if enacted, would apply only to US-based companies which have more than 50 employees and with more than 15% of that workforce comprising of H-1B visa workers.
Mr. Sikka said Infosys is “working on next generation visa-free global delivery model where we bring collaborative technologies to bear and creating a rich experience for people to work together.”
Infosys is the second biggest software services company in India and it posted a net profit of Rs. 3,708 crore for the third quarter that ended in December. Infosys also hit the $10 billion revenue mark for the calendar year 2016 (January to December), which Mr Sikka described as a huge “emotional” milestone.