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Nov. 13: British Telecom, which has a large offshore presence in India, today announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs by March 2009 but said its Indian operations would not be affected.
“The Indian operations would not see any retrenchment. The majority of the job cuts is UK-based. It is too early to know country-specific job cuts,” a company spokesperson said in London.
About 4,000 of the job losses will affect employees directly recruited by BT.
The cuts will mainly affect agency and contract staff and offshore workers, the company said. BT has a global workforce of 160,000. Sub-contractors and other indirect employees would also lose jobs, the group said.
The job cuts were announced after its pre-tax profits slumped by 11 per cent in the first six months of the current year.
Ian Livingston, chief executive of BT, described the action as “decisive”. The company said the move was aimed at reducing its dependence on consultants and contractors.
The company admitted that its performance was “disappointing” and the results in its struggling Global Services division were “simply not good enough”.
In India, outsourcing industry sources said the BT decision would not affect contracts already finalised and awarded.
Tech Mahindra, BT’s IT services joint venture with the Mahindra group, has outsourcing contracts worth at least Rs 9,760 crore for the next seven years. The projects will go on.
BT also has collaborations with HCL, Infosys, TCS and Wipro.
Tech Mahindra, which derives over 60 per cent of its revenue from BT projects, has more than 1,150 employees in Calcutta.
The UK giant is one of TCS’ major clients in IT strategy and consulting, application development and maintenance.
“Several hundred” employees are involved in BT processes for TCS in Calcutta. TCS sources said there would not be any impact in Calcutta or rest of India because of the BT job cuts.
Around 650 employees are involved in Wipro’s BT processes in Calcutta. “This (the job-cut decision) does not affect us,” said a BT process manager of Wipro in Calcutta.
