Larsen & Toubro Infotech evaluating multiple cities to grow footprint

"In India, we were in about five or six cities prior to the pandemic. We are now in nine cities. And, after opening the office in Noida, we will be in the tenth city. We are evaluating a few other locations like Indore, Ahmedabad and Kochi … so, multiple locations are under evaluation," Deshpande said.

Technology consulting and digital solutions company Larsen & Toubro Infotech, which has been focussing on increasing its footprints across multiple cities post pandemic, has said multiple locations are under evaluation for opening offices as per the results of its internal employee survey.

As per the results of the internal employee survey, LTI, a subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro Limited, on Friday opened its first facility in Kolkata. It is planning to set up one more office in the city by this fiscal-end.

“For us, post pandemic we have been focussed on increasing our location footprints across multiple cities because we believe we should now take work to people rather than taking people to work. We ran a survey internally in terms of our existing employees, which other cities would they like to operate from or what they would prefer. And, Kolkata was amongst the top few choices which came out in the survey. That is why we chose to start our first centre in Kolkata,” Nachiket Deshpande, chief operating officer, LTI, told FE.

The company has recently opened a centre in Coimbatore. Kolkata and Coimbatore were the top two centres which came from its employee survey. It is also planning to start an office in Noida. The company has also recently opened a bigger facility in Hyderabad.

“In India, we were in about five or six cities prior to pandemic. We are now in as many as nine cities. And, after opening the office in Noida, we will be in the tenth city. We are evaluating a few other locations like Indore, Ahmedabad and Kochi…so, multiple locations are under evaluation,” Deshpande informed.

He said the company will be opening offices in new locations according to a plan based on the employee survey, but it does not have any specific target in terms of total offices to be operationalised for this financial year. The expansion of footprints across multiple cities is part of its overall expansion plan globally.

LTI’s new Kolkata facility, which has about 340 seats, can support employees up to 500-550 in a hybrid work model. This facility will support the company’s service delivery capabilities for cloud, data, and digital technologies and create exciting career opportunities for local talent seeking experiences in these futuristic domains.

“We need to expand in Kolkata very soon because our existing around 250 people have already opted for transfers to the city. Our company has around 100 new offers that we have already rolled out for hiring in Kolkata, and these people are expected to join in the next few months. Also, there are close to 900 more people within L&T Infotech who have shown interest,” the chief operating officer said, adding with these numbers in mind the company would be looking to expand in the city very soon.

The company is targetting around 1000-1500 employees in Kolkata between the office, which has just been operationalized, and a new facility, which is likely to be opened by the end of this financial year.

Its employee strength stood at around 45,000 by March 31, 2022, in India. This year it plans to hire around 7000 people from various colleges. Currently, it has operations in 33 countries.

LTI said it added more people in FY22 than it did in the previous two years combined, and the headcount increased by 30%.
“Overall, our quarterly annualized attrition curve started to flatten in Q3 and it has dropped further by 200 basis points in Q4. This drop is much sharper at offshore while our onsite attrition needs to be addressed. We continue to engage our employees and our Yin-Yang Model reflects the new realities of hybrid future of work, which will help us retain talent,” the company pointed out. Significantly, the Indian IT industry has been dealing with high attrition rates.

Talking about, Larsen & Toubro Infotech’s hybrid work model, Deshpande said the model provides all its employees flexibility with personal choices and preferences based on customer-related constraints which could be security, access and regulatory-related. Also, the model takes into account the lifecycle stage of work or projects that employees are in.

Last month, Larsen & Toubro Infotech said it is expanding its global partnership with Google Cloud. LTI is setting up a dedicated business unit for Google Cloud’s six key solution pillars: application modernization, data management, infrastructure modernization, smart analytics, artificial intelligence, and security.

Notably, the boards of directors of LTI and Mindtree at their respective meetings on May 6 approved a composite scheme of amalgamation of both these independently listed IT services companies under the Larsen & Toubro Group. The proposed integration will see LTI and Mindtree join strengths to create an efficient and scaled-up IT services provider exceeding USD 3.5 billion.