Tata Consultancy Services Chairman Ratan Tata today said the company is planning to hire around 30,000 employees this fiscal.

"We estimate our manpower growth would be 30,000 new people this year," Tata told shareholders at the company's annual general meeting here. The country's largest software exporter has 1, 60,000 employees and had added 16,851 professionals in Q4 of the last fiscal.

Tata pointed out that in terms of global standing; TCS stands at the ninth position in terms of revenues, sixth in terms of profits, fourth in terms of market capitalisation and employee strength.

The US economy is recovering and it will sustain recovery more than Britain and Europe, Tata said, adding demand has started picking up and the share of IT services will increase. The current European crisis has not hit the company hard, but its revenue has come down marginally, he said.

"Slowdown and the crisis affected the euro, but we have not seen any impact of the current European situation. We had client-specific issues and currency issues," TCS Chief Executive Officer N Chandrasekaran told reporters on the sidelines of the AGM."The share of our European revenue has come down from 30 to around 25 per cent," Chandrasekaran said.

The company's telecom revenue suffered significantly, as there was a drop in volumes from one large European telecom service provider, he added.

"Looking at the markets, North America continues to lead the major markets in terms of growth. The UK also grew but the rest of Europe remained slow and stagnant," Chandrasekaran said.

"Our scale in emerging markets like Latin America, China, the Middle East and Africa continued to grow and now contributes revenue of over USD 1 billion, but remains largely project-based and not annuity," he added.

Assurance, BPO and infrastructure services continued to grow at higher rates than the company average. TCS is also beginning to see larger deals coming through in the traditional application development and maintenance space as well, Chandrasekaran said.

Meanwhile, replying to a query on the Tata Group's retirement policy vis-a-vis his own retirement, Tata said, "We are also human and we must move on and others should get a chance to take our place."

Source: (PTI)