Infosys to invest $100 million to ramp up China operations

IT bellwether Infosys MD and CEO S Gopalakrishnan said the company was looking at an investment of  $100 million in its Chinese operations over a period of time and expanding its workforce in the country from the current 2,850 to 4,000.

''All our centres are capable of handling all projects - be it in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai or Mangalore. We hope to create a similar centre in China too and have initiated talks with the government there to acquire land on lease. We will build our campus once we have land,'' he said after addressing the regional council of CII in Hyderabad yesterday.

Infosys is also planning to offer mid-term promotions to around 12,000 employees this month.

''Promotions and hikes will now be a part of our routine cycle. We had already given promotions in April. While attrition in the past two years had gone down to single digits, from last quarter to this quarter we have observed that it is down. We believe stability would happen next quarter,'' he said.

Responding to a query regarding UK government's move to scale down IT budgets, he said, ''Globally, even though we have come out of recession, the growth is muted. Problems that were there on the business side have now moved to governments. So, governments are looking at austerity measures.''

However, the uptick in IT is not limited to Infosys alone as the sector is expected to treble the intake of professionals this year as against the 50,000-60,000 of last year, according to Gopalakrishnan.