Product engineering company, Tata Elxsi plans to hire 900 more employees during the current fiscal and over half of them will be freshers.
“We will be hiring around 500 freshers and our lateral hires are expected to be around 400,” Mr Nitin Pai, Vice-President - Marketing, told Business Line . Tata Elxsi has around 4,000 employees currently.
All the freshers will be hired by the Embedded Product Design division, while the laterals would be distributed among all the four business divisions – Embedded Product Design, Industrial Design, Visual Computing Labs and Systems Integration.
Future demand
Though there is no current demand for the extra hands, Tata Elxsi is still adding them in anticipation of future demand.
"Most of the fresh hires will need around six to 12 months of training, so many of them will only be making contributions to the company around 2012-13," pointed out Mr Pai. The company faced some problems with attrition last year, and attrition in 2010-11 was around the 12-13 per cent mark, said Mr Pai. To tackle this, the company increased salaries to retain employees.
For the current financial year, Mr Pai said that he saw some positive possibilities in the semiconductor sector. “In 2008 and 2009, growth was down, and in 2010, it came back to 2007 levels.
However, there was not much focus on R&D, and we, therefore, didn't benefit. But this year, we are seeing a lot of interest in design."
Visual computing
Tata Elxsi is also betting on its Visual Computing Labs and even contemplating hiring its own creative team to produce and market animation on its own, said Mr Pai.
"We recently hired Mr Joel Hynek who won an Oscar for Best Effects in 1999 for the film ‘What Dreams May Come',” he said.
The company is currently working on four 3D films with Hollywood.