XLRI places batch of 180

XLRI said today that students from its first placement season with increased batch size were placed with Mittal Steel, Boston Consulting Group and HSBC Bank, with 31 per cent of batch recruited by banks, financial institutions and insurance sectors XLRI has increased its business management batch size from 60 to 120.

In all, over 180 students were placed instead of the usual 120, as was the case until last year.

One XLRI student was picked up by Mittal Steel with a $ 80,000 package in Europe.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for the first time paid the highest domestic offer of Rs 12 lakh, followed by HSBC Bank with an offer of Rs 11 lakh.

The average salary of the batch was Rs 7.4 lakh from Rs 7.14 lakh last year, with Rs 4.5 lakh being the lowest.

Abhisek Mukherjee, secretary of the placement committee, said, "The improvement in quality has assured not just placements, but a rise in the number of takes in certain sectors and some new entrants."

The biggest recruiters this year were GE and IBM, which picked up 12 and 11 students respectively. Banks, financial institutions and IT/ITES sectors were tied at the top with 36 accepted offers each.

The FMCG sector had 25 accepted offers, or 15 per cent of the batch, with offers from Asian Paints, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Colgate Palmolive, GlaxoSmithKline, HLL, ITC, Marico, Nestle, Pepsi, Reckitt Benckiser and Seagram.

Banking majors included ABN Amro, Citibank, HSBC Bank, ICICI Bank, IDBI Bank, Standard Chartered and UTI Bank. Financial Institutions that had accepted offers were GE Money, GECIS, NCDEX and SBI Caps.

AIG, ICICI Lombard and ICICI Prudential had 12 accepted offers amongst them.

Consulting firms included Accenture, BCG, Ernst & Young, Hewitt Associates, Mercer Human Resource Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Pharmaceutical sector employers included Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Novartis and Ranbaxy.

Bharti and Mahindra British Telecom (MBT) picked students, as did Cognizant Technology Solutions, eServe, HCL Technologies, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Infosys, Tata Technologies, TCS and Wipro.

Sabyasachi Sengupta, placement co-ordinator, said, "Quality is the most important factor. This year the number of offers and salary packages by most of the top companies have gone up."

Casimir Raj, director of XLRI, commented, "The placements are good this year, much better than expected. Despite the increase in quantity, the quality has improved as well. The placement committee as well as students from both the batches has worked hard to make the process a success."