The head honchos of Bangalore-based IT consulting/outsourcing/software-development company Infosys were in New York today for an analyst meeting (security analysts, not psychoanalysts, I think), and afterwards they chatted with some representatives of the embattled fourth estate. Infosys recently reported its first quarterly revenue gain since the recession really got going, and since the firm has operations all over the world and in lots of different sectors, I was curious where the growth was coming from. Chief operating officer S.D. Shibulal (a.k.a. Shibu) said the sectors where business was improving were:
financial services, energy and utilities, health care, retail
And the weak sectors were:
manufacturing, telecommunications
As for geography, Shibulal said things were picking up faster in the U.S. than in Europe (87% of Infosys revenue comes from those two regions). CEO S. Gopalakrishnan (a.k.a. Kris) said Infosys is planning to hire 1,000 people for “client-facing”—that is, consulting or programming—jobs in the U.S. over the next 12 months.
Gopalakrishnan also said, echoing Abbott’s Steve Fussell, that finding people in the U.S. with the right technical skills is a challenge. He said it’s a challenge in Europe, too. Not so much yet in India, where Infosys is planning to hire 18,000 people over the next year.
