Business   

U.S. crisis casts shadow on IIM hirings

KOLKATA: The ripples of the unfolding financial crisis in the U.S. is touching the Indian Institutes of Management. For some of them such as the IIM Calcutta (IIM-C), investment bankers such as Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch have been among the biggest recruiters, offering the fattest pay packets.

According to a student on the Joka campus here, Merrill Lynch, which was bought over by Bank of America, picked up 18 students in a batch of 290 last year for postings abroad in New York, London, Hong Kong and in India with payouts in tandem with locations. But typically an India posting would bring a salary of around Rs. 30 lakh annually plus bonuses. Lehman had trained nine interns last November as part of its summer training and it returned to the campus sure of firm offers of plum jobs. Not any more.

A student placement representative told The Hindu that “there has been no official intimation as yet from the investment bankers.”

Although the crisis in the U.S. financial markets had been looming large for nearly a year now, the fall of widely respected names in the investment banking industry had caught almost everyone unawares.

As recent as September 4, the IIM-C concluded its pre-placement offers (PPOs) for the 2009 batch with students bagging offers from consulting firms, investments banks, commercial banking and management and marketing firms.

“Notwithstanding the prevailing negative sentiment, especially in the international banking sector, IIM Calcutta has managed to buck the trend with its summer internships,” a communication from the institute said. Apart from the consultancy majors, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Barclays, HSBC, Credit Suisse and Citibank in the investment banking sector decided to give final job offers midway through the academic year itself.

Admitting that students holding many of the PPOs may have to look elsewhere now, the institute was unwilling to harbour any feeling of circumspection about the entire episode.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Essar starts work on U.S. facility
Kerala wooing IT majors
U.S. crisis casts shadow on IIM hirings
ONGC to raise loan to fund Imperial buy
Intel India designed microprocessor launched

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu