The country’s second largest IT services provider, Infosys Technologies, sees the domestic IT industry growing at just 15 per cent this financial year compared to more than 30 per cent last financial year — a direct fallout from the ongoing global slowdown.

Moreover, the company plans to freeze fresh recruitment after meeting this financial year’s target of hiring 25,000 people.

The company is seeing longer decision-making for 10-12 deals and expects the outsourcing sector’s growth rate to halve next year as some customers delay orders.

On cutting costs, Kris said, “We will have to look at controlling costs and expenses to run an optimised business. We will have to look at what are things that we need to do in order to prepare ourselves for the recovery.” The company expects recovery to happen in the next 15-18 months.

The CEO said there is more growth in the emerging markets and added that the company is not shifting any talent from the IT to its business process outsourcing business. “Companies appreciate good performance in slowdown and we are investing more on training and education. A lot of cross training is happening so that our employees become multi-skilled,” said Kris. The company spends almost 4 per cent of its revenues on training.

Commenting on the impact of the slowdown, Kris said the service offerings will change and that mergers and acquisitions will be impacted though recovery will increase outsourcing.

Last month, Kris said that while there were indications that IT budgets in 2009 would be lower than this year, the offshoring component would be higher. Infosys’ stock closed at Rs 1194.75, 3.19 per cent higher than the previous close.

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