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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nDownward curve<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n India’s top three IT companies \u2014 Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and HCLTech \u2014 saw a steep drop in their net addition for the 2023 fiscal year \u2014 down cumulatively from 1.97 lakh to 68,886 \u2014 a 65 percent drop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n They also reported a dismal quarter and were not optimistic about the near term due to the banking crisis in US regional banks and European banks, as well as the macroeconomic climate at large.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cumulative hiring numbers<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hiring is seen as an indicator of demand, and the stress was visible in Q4FY23<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a 98.7 percent drop in the number of employees the three companies added on a net basis in Q4FY23 compared to the same period last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TCS, HCLTech, and Infosys added just 884 employees on a net basis in Q4FY23, compared to 68,257 in Q4FY22<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sequentially, the net addition of the three companies has fallen from 2,375 in Q3FY23.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TCS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n TCS added 1,03,546 employees in FY22 on a net basis, which fell to 22,600 in FY23.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Q4FY23, TCS added 821 employees which is a significant drop from the 35,209 they added in Q4FY22.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attrition reached 21.5 percent on a last-twelve-month (LTM) basis in Q2FY23, and has moderated to 20.1 percent in Q4. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It expects attrition to return to pre-pandemic levels by the second half of the fiscal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They onboarded over 44,000 freshers, as well as their \u201chighest ever number of experienced professionals during the year\u201d, said Milind Lakkad, Chief People Officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the coming year, the company is looking to add 46,000 campus hires in FY24.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The number of lateral hires \u201cwill be dependent on the demand from the business every quarter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said, “We had brought down our lateral hiring and our overall capacity addition, leveraging the strong investments that we had made in the last year<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are systematically using the return to normalcy on travel to reposition our employee base in North America, away from the short-term contingent labour back to our more stable employee-led delivery model,\u201d Gopinathan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Infosys <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Infosys saw its yearly net addition nearly halve to 29,219, from 54,396 last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Q4, it ended the quarter with 3,611 fewer employees than it had at the end of Q3. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In comparison, the company added 21,948 employees on a net basis in the same period last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chief Financial Officer Nilanjan Roy said that the company\u2019s utilisation has declined to 80 percent due to softness in demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said the company expects the utilization to improve gradually in the coming quarters as freshers start getting deployed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They will “calibrate the hiring for FY24 based on the available pool of employees, growth expectations and attrition trends.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company hired roughly 51,000 freshers in FY23, but refused to give any targets going ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company\u2019s attrition declined to 20.9 percent on an LTM basis in Q4FY23, declining steeply in every quarter of the fiscal year<\/p>\n\n\n\n Quarterly annualized attrition has reduced by over 4 percent sequentially, is the lowest in the nine quarters, and is below pre-pandemic levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The headcount addition for FY24 could be tepid due to \u201climited demand visibility, significant headroom on utilization, moderating lateral attrition and trainees becoming billable\u201d, according to Kotak Institutional Equities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n