Infosys chief executive Salil Parekh on Wednesday said it will follow its United States localisation strategy in other markets such as Australia, New Zealand and Europe and it has hired 4,000 of its 10,000 employee target in the US.
Parekh was speaking at Morgan Stanley's 20th Annual India Summit in Mumbai.
"I think, in general what we see in many of our markets -- Europe, Australia, New Zealand, US market, independent of the current political situation, the overall sentiment is to enhance more local jobs activities," said Parekh.
He further said that in the US, Infosys has 4,000 local hires, of which 800 are college graduates.
The Bengaluru-based firm had last year announced that it will set up four technology and innovation hubs in the US, and hire about 10,000 locals by 2019.
Responding to a query on whether this focus on localisation will hurt margins, he declined to provide a long term impact, but said the company sees hiring local US graduates as a positive for margins in the "very short term".
The Indian IT industry has for long worked on the cost arbitrage model, which allowed it to keep labour costs low, employing Indian engineers to serve clients based in other geographies.
In the past couple of years, there has been a rising protectionist sentiment across the globe- from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and even parts of Asia- forcing Indian IT companies to hire locally and paying higher wages, which has impacted margins.
Responding to a question about expansion into China, Parekh said Infosys' business in the geography was very small, and that Infosys does not "have a plan to look at a large expansion in China ...at least in the three year horizon".
He also said that Infosys was on track to execute its execution strategy laid out in April.
Outlining a three-pronged strategy, CEO Salil Parekh has said in April that the focus for FY19 will be to “stabilise”, FY20 to “build momentum”, and FY21 to “accelerate”.
Parekh said he has been meeting employees, who have shown keen interest in skilling themselves for the future. Responding to a query on how the past two years had impacted the company, Parekh said "we need a phase of calming things down and stabilising," hence the current fiscal will be spent in doing just that.