After TCS, IBM becomes second largest employer in India’s private sector

While Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services firm is also the largest employer in the country’s private sector with as many as 163,700 staff as on June 30, 2010, it is interesting to note that IBM, the multinational computer, technology and information technology consulting conglomerate headquartered in Armonk, New York, has emerged to be the second largest private sector employer in this country surpassing any other Tata firm, company owned by the Ambani brothers, Infosys or Wipro.

It is interesting to note that although IBM has more than one lakh employees on its rolls in India, it still remains a secret and hardly any one in the company’s US headquarter will acknowledge the fact for fear of repercussions at home at a time when President Obama has been striving to keep the high profile tech jobs in the country. In fact, desperate to curb outsourcing by American firms, Obama has not only issued oblique warnings to ‘erring’ companies, while promising tax sops to those who provided employment to the US professionals.

Quoting a source in the Armonk-based company, a news portal reports that IBM’s employee strength in India will surpass its workforce in the US within the next few years. The source further said that although the company has as many as 155,000 employees on its rolls in the United States, the rate of hiring there is significantly sluggish than in India. Globally, IBM employs more than 400,000 employees denoting that every one in three employees of the company is an Indian.

Presently, the workforce of IBM in India is four-fold more compared to the largest private sector firm in India – Reliance Industries that has approximately 23,000 people on its rolls. IBM now employs more than the cumulative workforce of the two Tata flagship companies – Tata Steel (81,000 employees) and Tata Motors (24,000 employees). In fact, a number of industry analysts as well as manpower recruitment firms consider IBM’s present employee strength to be around 1.3 lakh compared to 1.14 lakh employees of India’s second largest IT firm Infosys Technologies as on June 30, 2010. Some experts even say that the company’s BPO arm IBM-Daksh alone employees approximately 50,000 professionals in the country. Add to this another 30,000 people employed by IBM Labs in India.

The report further says that that IBM has stopped revealing the break-up of its workforce geographically since 2007, when the company had said that it has around 73,000 employees in India. Ever since, IBM has been maintaining that it is a multinational corporation and, hence, the number of its employees in different geographic regions was of little importance. Nevertheless, everyone concerned is familiar with the fact that IBM has been on a hiring spree in India. The employee figures released by the company in 2007 (73,000) was a 40 per cent augmentation over its employee strength (53,000) in the previous year. And from 2007 onwards, on an average, the IT major has been hiring as many as 20,000 people annually in India.

According to a HR expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, even during the recent recession years (2008-2009), IBM along with Accenture had kept the IT job market thriving in India. What is significant is that at a time when several companies are endeavoring to cut operational costs by reducing workforce, the aggressive recruitment policy of IBM is being viewed as a luxury that very few firms can actually meet the expense of.