It was no coincidence that yesterday’s announcement by Citigroup’s Chairman and CEO Charles O. Prince that the company was going to shed 15,000 jobs and concentrate on streamlining the business happened during a meeting in Mumbai.
Today, news has broken as Mr Prince wraps up his tour of Asia that the plans involve relocating or elimination of many of the high-cost roles from London, New York and Hong Kong.
Citigroup has over 20,000 workers based in India, who are generally in admin and bill payment services, with just a small proportion in highly-skilled jobs. The balance, it seems, could be set to shift.
This deal is reminiscent of IBM’s similar decision in June last year, which we covered in The IndusView. At its AGM in Bangalore, a year on from boosting its workforce in India by over 15,000 while reducing headcount worldwide by a similar number, IBM announced a long-term strategy to align with India.
Since then, IBM’s headcount in the country has swollen to 53,000 while large deals with domestic telcos have spurned it to plan $6 billion in investment by 2009.
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