The subsidiary employs 360 people, a majority of them from Expert Information Services — the first acquisition Infosys Australia made six years ago.

Infosys board member and director for human resources Mohandas Pai confirmed that there were some separations from Infosys Australia. Responding to a mail, he said, “We have had an organisational restructuring in our Australia subsidiary and as a result, some positions have become redundant. It is the first time after the acquisition that this is being done.”

The tech leader has, however, promised that the laid-off employees would get assistance for outplacement as well as severance pay. A few months ago, Gary Ebeyan, who used to head Infosys Australia, quit the firm citing personal reasons. He was replaced by Jacqueline Korhonen, a former IBM executive. Revenues and profits of Infosys Australia have been slipping in the past three quarters of the fiscal in part due to the impact of the currency movements.

From a first quarter revenue of $34 million and a net income of $3 million, its second quarter revenue slipped to $30.84 million and net income to $2.8 million. In the third quarter, revenue fell further to $26 million and net income to $1.62 million.

“The Australian dollar is weakening significantly,” explained an analyst, who said Infosys could be laying off staff in other regions such as the UK as well. In Australia, Infosys’ largest customer is Telestra, he added.

The Mumbai-based IT company joins its smaller rival Infosys which too has put around 5,000 of its employees under the so-called performance scanner.

Incidentally, TCS spokesperson denied that the company’s performance improvement plan is any different this year than previous years. The spokesperson claimed that this is an annual exercise to ensure that we continue to drive delivery excellence for our customers. Less than 1% of our workforce has been put under the scanner in the current fiscal.

Last year, the company had asked 500 employees to leave after a similar performance improvement plan.

Recently, in a client note, brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets said that TCS has seen project cancellations in the last four weeks. Quoting TCS chief financial officer S Mahalingam, CLSA said that the company sees slowdown in demand bottoming out in the March quarter and expects a recovery in the June quarter.

In Infosys case, the company has asked senior managers (project managers, senior and group project managers, delivery managers) to give lowest performance rating (4 on a scale of 1-4) to the ‘underperforming’ 5 per cent as a part of its consolidated relative ranking (CRR). Though lowest rankings are not new in the company, this is the first time that Infosys has made it compulsory.

Some 40-50 sales executives at Infosys too have been reportedly asked to quit in the last two months. Most of these were located in the US and were from consulting background.

“They are going to come out in June or July… They will come as and when we actually need them. Hopefully, it will happen. If it does not happen, it will spill over to next year,” Pratik Kumar, Executive vice-president (Human Resources) of Wipro, said when asked about the 8,000 offers made to the freshers.

“Every offer which we have made will be honoured,” he said. To a query, he said the company is giving broad indications to those who are coming closer to joining time about when they could actually join.

Agreeing with a question that the delay in recruitment would create a sense of dissatisfaction among the candidates, he said, “The question is whether you actually go back on your offer or go back on them… They understand that there is a delay because of the business situation.