IT services firm Infosys has been consistently improving its revenue per employee in the last few quarters. Its numbers are better than those of its top two Indian competitors, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, due to higher returns from consulting and systems integration (C&SI), says a company official.

Revenue per employee is a function of various things, including price points, portfolio of services, onsite-offshore mix, utilisation and client mix. However, “our proportion of revenues from C&SI is higher than leading offshore peers,” said a company spokesperson.

Reduced hiring Reduced hiring by Infosys in comparison with TCS, especially during the last two financial years, has helped the Bangalore-headquartered firm boost its revenue per employee metric. However, attrition remains a challenge.

The recent improvement in utilisation for Infosys was mainly due to an increase in attrition, which forced other employees to bear the increasing workload, said Bozhidar Hristov, Analyst, Professional Services Practice, Technology Business Research, US.

If Infosys wants to maintain healthy (above its peers) revenue per employee and utilisation, it will need to pick up hiring of both freshers to support large-outsourcing deals and laterals to add value to C&SI opportunities. It should also invest in automation tools and IP-backed assets to sustain non-linear growth.

Infosys is leveraging its expanded foothold in Europe following the acquisition of Lodestone to boost brand awareness and drive high-value C&SI sales. In comparison, while TCS’ ability to provide operations execution remains its key lever, consulting on operations hinders its ability to expand high-value C&SI sales, said Hristov.

Automation helps According to Moorthy K Uppaluri, CEO, Randstad India, in the IT sector, revenue per employee indicates the overall growth of the company, employee productivity and the non-linearity of the business model. Most IT majors have been winning large, multi-year project-based engagements, and they have built efficiency through automation to execute these projects. This has had a positive impact on the revenue per employee equation.

Companies are investing in development of products in core banking, IT infrastructure management and IT accelerators for emerging technologies to improve non-linear revenue. Such measures have helped improve the revenue per employee consistently, by around 15-20 per cent over the last five years.

A higher onsite ratio of employees also impacts this metric as for the same number of people, the billing is much higher, he said.

Rituparna Chakraborty, Senior VP & Co- Founder, TeamLease Services, said the top IT companies have vastly improved productivity.

Wipro this year had a flat headcount for revenue that last year would have required it to hire 10,000 people.

The role of HR for most IT companies is shifting from selecting to upskilling.

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