BackCorporate India’s employee cost crosses ₹1-trillion mark
Corporate India's employee cost crosses ₹1-trillion mark
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New Delhi: Driven by ever-expanding workforce and salary levels, the employee expense bill of Indian corporates has grown beyond ₹ 1,00,000 crore level with public sector companies and private sector IT giants retaining their position as the top spenders.
The collective employee expenses of companies, whose fiscal year end on March 31 and have announced their full-year results, has grown to ₹ 1,14,900 crore, representing a 35% gain over ₹ 85,000 crore in the previous fiscal.
However, the combined turnover of these 505 companies, whose annual results are available with stock exchanges, has increased to ₹ 14,31,209 crore. This represents a 13% increase from the cumulative turnover of 644 companies last year, which stood at ₹ 12,67,348 crore, based on the available data.
The companies spent close to 8% of their collective turnover on employee expenses in the last fiscal, up from about 6% a year ago.
The country’s largest lender State Bank of India remained the biggest spender with annual employee cost of about ₹ 10,600 crore for the year ended March 31.
SBI is followed by Tata group’s IT arm TCS, the country’s largest software exporter, which booked a bill of over ₹ 7,700 crore for employee costs in the year.
Infosys and Wipro, the other two domestic IT giants, incurred employee expenses of ₹ 6,314 crore and ₹ 5,768 crore, respectively.
While Satyam Computer’s employee expenses stood at ₹ 3,858 crore in FY07, PSU oil giants like ONGC and Indian Oil Corp (IOC) also spent close to ₹ 3,000 crore each on their workforce.
Besides other IT firms, banks and metal firms also emerged as major spenders on employees.
Fourteen 14 banks, from both public and private sectors, featured in the top fifty companies’ list in terms of employee expenses.
Largest private sector lender ICICI Bank was at ninth position with a total bill of about ₹ 2,636 crore, while Punjab National Bank (PNB), Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank, Bank of India, Syndicate Bank, Indian Bank, HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Allahabad Bank, Andhra Bank, Bank of Maharashtra and UTI Bank booked employee expenses between ₹ 400-2,400 crore.
Besides, companies like Tata Motors, Mahindra and Mahindra, Tata Steel, L&T, Aditya Birla Nuvo, NTPC, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications and Tech Mahindra recorded employee expenses of between ₹ 1,000-2,500 crore each.
In the previous year ended March 31, 2006, SBI was on the top with annual employee expenses of ₹ 10,764 crore, a tad higher than its latest year bill. However, most of the major spenders have seen an increase in their employee expenses in FY07.
TCS’ bill increased from ₹ 4,720 crore in FY06, while Infosys, Wipro and Satyam also recorded higher employee expenses in their latest fiscal.
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