LTIMindtree defers pay raise again, 50% employees to receive hikes in January, rest in April

The company posted a 10.3 percent increase in consolidated net profit at Rs 1,381 crore in September quarter

LTIMindtree will be spreading out its FY26 wage hikes over two quarters – 50 percent of the employees will receive their increments from January 1 onwards and the remaining from April 1, CEO and MD Venu Lambu said at the company’s second quarter earnings conference call on October 16.

“This may be the new normal going forward as well. We may not have a one wage hike in one particular quarter for all of employees. We are beginning from this time. We will have wage hike spread over two quarters. The first tranche will be effective from January 1, and the second one will be in the April 1 quarter. And I would expect that we will have to adjust to the new normal that we will have two stages of increments coming in our employee base,” Lambu said.

Giving context on this decision, Lambu said that “the topic of wage hikes is evolving,” as the industry and the company are going through a significant inflection point.

“There are a lot opportunities on the other side of the inflection point. And one of the critical aspects of the journey traveling together with our employees is about how we cross skill and upskill them to the next AI requirement or AI projects that that keeps coming to us,” he said.

He added, “In the agent AI era, the skill becomes a very critical element of that. So we take our employees along that skilling program and that’s already in progress and that will continue to accelerate.”

His comments on the IT industry’s inflection point comes at time when peer and India’s largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is in the midst of laying off about 2 percent or over 12,000 employees citing skill mismatch in the AI era.

At LTIMindtree, however, this is not the first time that the wage hikes have been delayed.

In FY25, LTIMindtree rolled out annual salary increments in the October-December quarter or Q3.

In FY24 too, LTIMindtree had delayed its wage hike cycle, which typically begins in the month of April, to August.

LTIMindtree reported its July-September quarter earnings on October 16. The company posted a 10.3 percent increase in consolidated net profit at Rs 1,381 crore.

The company had reported a net profit of Rs 1,251 crore in the same period a year ago.

LTIMindtree for the first time crossed Rs 10,000 crore in revenue in a quarter with over 10 per cent growth to Rs 10,394.3 crore during the reported quarter compared to Rs 9,432.9 crore it registered in the September 2024 quarter.