Merger of Capgemini & Kanbay: 23000 jobs in India

It could soon be raining jobs in India’s booming information technology sector, with the merger of French IT consultant, Capgemini and Kanbay International set to create over 23,000 new jobs in the next four years.
The deal to buy out Kanbay, an IT services company that is listed in the US but operates mostly out of India, would be unlike regular mergers and acquisitions as far as job layoffs are concerned.
In fact, Capgemini which has 6,000 employees at present hopes that the proposed merger would create a multinational behemoth with a workforce of about 35,000 employees in India by 2010.
The India head count of Capgemini, which on Thursday signed an agreement to acquire Nasdaq-listed Kanbay for about $1.25 billion, would increase from 6,000 to about 12,000 by the end of this year.
Currently, Kanbay has a workforce of over 5,000 in India, which represents a large chunk of its worldwide headcount of 6,900 employees.
No layoffs are expected following the merger, as the US as well as Indian operations of the two companies are spread across different cities. Moreover, Kanbay is more focused on financial services segment as compared to Capgemini, industry experts said.
The deal would also make Capgemini the largest MNC in the Indian IT services space in terms of Indian head count percentage ahead of giants like IBM, Accenture and Electronic Data Systems.
The company would become the third largest in terms of the total number of employees in the country after IBM (20,000) and Accenture (12,500), while excluding the employees in their BPO operations.