WIT Wipro Ltd

By Newley Purnell 

NEW DELHI -- President-elect Donald Trump doesn't take office in Washington until Friday, but he is already forcing firms in India's mammoth $108 billion technology-outsourcing industry to rethink their hiring practices in the U.S., their largest market.

While Mr. Trump has chastised U.S. firms for offshoring American jobs, Indian outsourcing firms could be set to see renewed heat for doing the opposite -- placing foreign workers in the U.S., mainly through a skilled-worker visa, known as the H-1B. Faced with the prospect of possible new curbs on those visas from a president who has pledged to ensure that Americans get their first pick of available jobs, outsourcers are ramping up hiring both on American college campuses and at home in India.

"Depending on the nature of the policy, it can have some impact on the way companies like mine have worked in the past, so we will have to adjust to that," said Vishal Sikka, chief executive of Infosys Ltd., one of India's top outsourcing and software companies, in an interview in Davos, Switzerland.

Nothing that there is a "severe shortage" of people with the right technical skills in the U.S., Mr. Sikka said Infosys would still have to "train and hire more locally and work together with clients in figuring out how to balance that with the global talent that is outside, using more technology and so forth and use the visa as necessary and as permitted."

Early this month, prominent Republican lawmaker Rep. Darrell Issa reintroduced a bill to tighten H-1B rules. But it is still unclear what action Mr. Trump or his administration might take, if any, to restrict the visas.

Mr. Trump issued a statement during the campaign vowing to "end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program," though at other times he said he supported highly-skilled immigration. In addition, his wife, Melania Trump, says she used an H-1B visa to work in the U.S. as a fashion model, meaning Mr. Trump might be personally familiar with the program's practical applications.

The demand for H-1B visas, intended to fill jobs for which there aren't qualified Americans, is high both from U.S. technology firms like Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. and Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. Last April, the number of applications surpassed the entire fiscal year's supply of 85,000 visas within five days, making it the fourth straight year in which demand surpassed supply in under a week. Some two-thirds of the visas, allotted by lottery, go to the tech sector.

U.S. critics of Indian outsourcers say the firms secure high-skill visas for jobs U.S. workers could do for clients like banks, retailers and others, but for whom they would have to pay more. The Indian firms say they have difficulty finding enough U.S. tech workers to hire.

"We hope we can work together" with the Trump administration, said Shivendra Singh, who heads global trade development for India's tech industry body Nasscom, which cut its growth forecast for the outsourcing industry soon after Mr. Trump's election.

Mr. Singh acknowledged Indian firms grapple with the perception that they rely excessively on skilled-worker visas. "People mention visa abuse, low cost labor, the replacement of American workers," he said, but he noted that outsourcers work with most of the U.S.'s largest corporations, contributing to the American economy.

A spokeswoman at TCS, India's largest outsourcer by sales, didn't immediately respond to questions about the company's preparations for potential changes to visa rules. A Wipro spokesman declined to comment, citing the quiet period ahead of its quarterly results due next week.

Following the U.S. election, Nasscom, which stands for the National Association of Software and Services Companies, in November cut its growth forecast for the sector to 8%-10% for the fiscal year ending March 31. That is down from a previous estimate of 10%-12% and far below the industry's 16.5% growth for the fiscal year ended in 2012. The group cited "global, political and economic and business scenarios" among the factors.

In India, the outsourcing industry employs nearly 3.7 million people, representing a crucial path to the middle class in the world's second-most-populous country. The U.S. accounts for about 60% of the Indian outsourcing industry's revenue, according to Nasscom, and India's outsourcers send tens of thousands of workers to the U.S. every year.

Hiring more workers in the U.S. could raise costs for Indian tech firms, said Madhu Baba, an analyst who studies the tech sector at Mumbai-based brokerage Prabhudas Lilladher, as they would likely demand higher salaries. Indian staff are also more likely to move to wherever they are needed in the U.S. and can simply be sent home when projects end, while workers hired domestically might be less mobile and may expect longer-term employment, he said.

Outsourcers might look to acquire smaller IT-services firms in the U.S., which would boost their manpower there but require financial outlays in the near-term, he said. The companies are also looking at hiring additional workers in India to do more work for companies in the U.S. remotely, Mr. Baba said.

The increased scrutiny on outsourcing firms' U.S. hiring practices comes as they also face challenges due in part to the rise of new technologies like cloud computing, which require less labor.

To make matters worse, outsourcers' clients in the critical financial industry have also been slashing IT budgets amid macroeconomic uncertainty following the U.K. referendum to leave the European Union and Mr. Trump's election.

Deborah Ball contributed to this article

Write to Newley Purnell at newley.purnell @wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 19, 2017 09:35 ET (14:35 GMT)

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