Thursday, March 31, 2005

Paging 81 batch XLers

The 81 batch alumni are trying to relocate each other, in preparation for their SJR in 2006. In case, you are from 81batch, or know the contacts of anyone from the 81 batch, please communicate them to KP Naidu (81PMIR)

KP Naidu
Sun Microsystems
USA

Friday, March 25, 2005

Rajiv Kaul moving to Redmond

Microsoft India managing director Rajiv Kaul has moved to the company's headquarters in Redmond as the senior director in the Windows client emerging market group.
Rajiv would now focus on driving specific technology initiatives in emerging markets including India, a company statement said in New Delhi on Thursday. Neelam Dhawan, former vice president, customer solutions group of HP, has replaced Rajiv as MD for sales and marketing of Microsoft India.

http://in.rediff.com/money/2005/mar/24ms.htm

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

XL Celeb Watch - Manoj Verghese - 97 batch

Spotted - Manoj Verghese - 97 batch, grinning out of the Business page of TOI (pg 13), Hyderabad edition.

He's Head of HR for Google's operations in Hyderabad. So spam him guys n gals n check how good his email filters are.....

Friday, March 18, 2005

Xlers on Campus need YOUR Help

With the placement report already posted by Dr. Madhukar Shukla, indicating the success we had in this year's placements, I would like to specially thank Mr. K.N. Venkataraman and Mr. Narsimha Rao for sparing time for talks on careers in Finance and IT (IT consulting) respectively.

The senior batch (and the junior batch) found both the sessions very useful in making the decision during the Campus Recruitment Program, 2005.

We are in process of organizing more of such talks and solicit your support in this regard. In case you are interested in counselling the students on any topic which can be helpful in choosing the career path, please reply back to me. This could be related to academic or non academic aspects. (e.g Careers Overseas: the ground reality etc.). A similar talk on Business consulting by Mr. Jeevan Joshi is already in line.

Secondly, two other events are happening this year.

A more useful Alumni meet
In the summers, we are trying to organize brain-storming sessions along with the alumni meet conducted every year, so as to maximize the opportunity which the meet provides. However, this depends on the interests of the alumni members largely, whether they want such a session or would like to come for party only.

National Finance Seminar
The other event would be the National Finance Seminar, happening in the month of August. For this event we need suggestions on the theme. We want to make it attractive for the industry personnels as well as the students. To attract professionals from Mumbai, we intend to invite someone from the political circles so that the professionals feel that their opinions would be heard and considered.
Suggestions for the theme and in general related to the seminar are most welcome.

Rahul Bhargava
BM - Ist Yr.
XLRI, Jamshedpur
Drop mail to Rahul Bhargava

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Alumni Meet up in London 19 March

Deepa Abraham has been co-ordinating this meet up. Her contact details are at the bottom.

Hi People,

I have booked Eriki for lunch. Food is consistently good and they have great reviews at Toptable and Time-out. It is normally closed for sat lunch but they will open especially for us. I have 13 confirmed attendees and 3 tentatives.

Charge will be GBP 18 per head for food (incl service tax etc) - drinks will be as consumed. I negotiated this price for min 15 attendees

Tentative menu
Starters : chicken tikka, sheesh kebba, dahi batata, paneer, samosa/ pakoda Main : 1 chicken, 1 lamb, 2 veg, dal, raita, salad Dessert : Mango margoa/ kulfi

Address :
4 - 6 Northways Parade
Finchley Road
Swiss Cottage
London
NW3 5EN

Nearest tube station : Swiss Cottage (jubilee line) - 2 stops from baker street. also buses 82, 13, 113, C11 go past the restaurant.

check out write-up on toptable

Confirmed (please let me know if more people are coming or bringing along
partners)
1. Ambe+1
2. Arifa
3. Sanjiv Bhatia
4. Jayanth
5. Shailesh Sreedharan +1
6. Rama + 1
7. Rakesh Kapoor
8. Reema
9. Deepa + Anil

Tentatives
* Rekha Gomes
* Dipayan
* Gaurav Singh

Please let me know if there are any additions to the list...... would be lovely to see as many people as possible. I need to confirm numbers at the restaurant tonight. Email or call me for any changes. Also, on the day, if you need directions etc, feel free to call the restaurant at 020 7722 0606.
Deepa Abraham

Thursday, March 10, 2005

XLRI Placement creates New Records in a Unique Year

First placement season with increased batch size concludes with new records
Mittal Steel makes International Offer on first visit
Boston Consulting Group, HSBC Bank make highest domestic offers
31% of batch recruited by Banks, Financial Institutions and Insurance Sectors

It is placement season and the students of XLRI Jamshedpur have reason to rejoice as the final placement of the batch of 2005 concludes on a successful note yet again. The placement of the outgoing batch of 2005 was unique, as this was the first year after XLRI increased its Business Management batch size from 60 to 120. In all, there were over 180 XLers to be placed instead of the usual 120, as was the case until last year: increase, or no-increase, the confidence that the Corporate world reposes on XLers was reinforced, with the finest names in full action.

The statistics: XLRI had a first time international offer from Mittal Steel with a US $ 80,000 package – based out of Europe. XLRI also welcomed the prestigious Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for the first time – BCG made the highest domestic offer of Rs 12 Lakhs. This was closely followed by HSBC Bank, which made an offer of Rs 11 Lakh. The average salary of the batch was Rs 7.4 Lakhs, with Rs 4.5 Lakhs being the lowest.

The biggest recruiters this year were GE and IBM, which picked up 11 students each. Banks / Financial Institutions and IT / ITES sectors were tied at the top with 36 accepted offers each. Banks, Financial Institutions, and the Insurance Sector accounted for 31% of the batch, reaffirming the strong Finance base that XLRI has created over the years.

The FMCG Sector had 25 accepted offers (15% of the batch). Companies that made offers comprised regular big shots: Asian Paints, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Colgate Palmolive, GlaxoSmithKline, HLL, ITC, Marico, Nestle, Pepsi, Reckitt Benckiser and Seagram. While ITC recruited 6 XLers, Asian Paints and Coke closely followed with 5 and 4 respectively.

Banks and Financial Institutions made their presence felt in a remarkable manner this year: Banking Majors included ABN Amro, Citibank, HSBC Bank, ICICI Bank, IDBI Bank, Standard Chartered and UTI Bank. Standard Chartered had the highest number of accepted offers at 6, closely followed by UTI Bank with 5. Financial Institutions that had accepted offers were GE Money, GECIS, NCDEX and SBI Caps.

The sunrise Insurance Sector was a big hit this time with AIG, ICICI Lombard and ICICI Prudential having 12 accepted offers amongst them. ICICI Prudential and AIG had 6 and 4 accepted offers, respectively. Together, Banks, Financial Institutions and the Insurance Sector recruited 31% of the batch.

Consulting Firms accounted for 13% of the batch – the elite club had Accenture Business Consulting, BCG, Ernst & Young, Hewitt Associates, Mercer Human Resource Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers. While Hewitt had 6 accepted offers, E & Y had 5.

Recruiters from the Pharmaceutical Sector – Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Novartis and Ranbaxy – accounted for 6% of the batch. The Telecom Sector picked up 4% of the batch with majors Bharti and Mahindra British Telecom (MBT).

The other biggest recruiting industry was IT and ITES accounting for 24% of the batch – Cognizant Technology Solutions, eServe, HCL Technologies, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Infosys, Tata Technologies, TCS and Wipro had offers being accepted. IBM had 11; Cognizant 9 and TCS, Wipro had 5 accepted offers.

The Core Sector included L & T, Mittal Steel and Tata Steel, while General Management companies in the fray included Aditya Birla Group and TAS. Air India, iGate, Fleetguard, ICI Paints and Titan represented other diverse sectors.

XLRI welcomed first-time participants in Accenture (Business Consulting wing), Air India, Bharti, Boston Consulting Group, ICICI Lombard, MBT, Mittal Steel, NCDEX and Novartis. Cadbury, L&T, Nestle and Titan returned to XLRI’s Final Placements after a short break.


XLers also created a new record by bagging over 30 Pre-Placement Offers from companies, based on Summer Internship projects. The details:

BPCL, GE and HLL made 3 offers each.
AIG, Cognizant, Hewitt, Hewlett Packard and Mercer made 2 offers each.
Coke, DRL, Ernst & Young, Fleetguard, HSBC Bank, ICICI Prudential, L&T, Marico, NSEIT, Seagram, Standard Chartered and TAS all made an offer each.

In all, 35 Lateral offers and 30 pre placement offers were made. A combined number of 35 students signed out by accepting Pre-placement and Lateral offers.

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

CRP 2005 Accomplished

well.. as usual everyone got placed [ho hum ;-)]

the key highlights would perhaps include the first international offer at XL ... LN mittal.. a cool $80,000. Also BCG recruited one person and so did HSBC Bank after quite some time..

the new companies: cadbury, nestle, novartis, accenture business consulting, intel & a few others the rest of the facts and figures are being compiled... In a day or so, we will have the exact numbers.. how many in each sector etc.....

Mohit Kishore
BM '05

On a lighter note :
In the meanwhile, the placecomm is working hard to calculate the average salary which was accepted by XL students. Average salary, incidentally, is not as easy to calculate as it seems. Hard decisions have to be taken, e.g., should the travel cost of the company executives to attend CRP be added to the CTC or not? is the market rental value of the office-space part of the monthly emoluments or not? if the company uses 3 bottles of Harpic to keep the office toilet, clean, and it is used by 23 people, how does one calulate the value to be added to the CTC? etc...

Monday, March 7, 2005

Xl movements

Prasad Oommen Kurien (POK) PMIR 98 - joins HP GlobalSoft in Bangalore as a Organizational Effectiveness Consultant from StanChart's BPO SCOPE, in Chennai

Chand Narayan PMIR 2001 joins CNBC at Mumbai from Nipuna Services in Hyderabad

Gunjan from 2000 batch has moved to London.

Gaurav Narasimhan, BMD 99 has moved to Reston, VA to work with iGATE Global Solutions as a Principal in the Oracle Practice. He was previously with Oracle Consulting.

Reema Sen of PMIR 1995 who was with HSBC Hong Kong is now studying at LSE in London.

Sunday, March 6, 2005

Job throb in B-School

Jamshedpur, March 6: Companies from the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector dominated the first slot of the annual campus recruitment process which entered its third day today. The campus recruitment programme (CRP) began on Friday.

XLRI sources said more than 20 companies, majority of them from FMCG sector, took part in the first phase selecting a sizeable number of students.

The companies included Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), Godrej, Glaxo, Coke, Reckitt Benckiser, Pepsi, Nestle, Cadbury, General Electric (GE), Accenture, Pricewater Coopers (PWC), Ernst and Young, ABN Amro, ICICI Bank and ICICI Prulife Insurance Company.

Olam International Limited, an international trading company, took part in the placement process for the first time and selected a few students. Sources said Coke, which had offered the highest salary last year, picked up four students — three from Business Management and one from Personnel Management and Industrial Relations offering attractive package.

XLRI officials said the second slot of placement process will see participation of companies from FMCG, banking, financial services and pharmaceutical sectors. Some of the prominent companies which will participate in the second slot are Marico Industries, IBM, Ranbaxy, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), IDBI Bank and Aditya Birla Group.

Last year’s batch had created a record with the entire batch bagging good job offers in just nine hours. Last year, the batch-size comprised 124 students as compared to 180 this year.

The campus wore a lively atmosphere and the mood among students was upbeat.

“The campus recruitment process is the culmination of two years of hard work. The portfolio of companies visiting XLRI this year is impressive not only in its size but also in its diversity. The companies are offering a attractive salary package this year,” said a student, who got an lucrative offer from Coke.

Last year, the highest salary was offered by Coke — Rs 8.78 lakh — while the average salary was Rs 7.14 lakh.

XLRI sources said this time too the placement process would be completed much before the expected time.

Saturday, March 5, 2005

Alumni Cell created in XL.

Hi,
The students have created an Alumni Cell in XL. They are looking at co-ordinating with XL alumni all over the world.
Below is a appeal that they have sent out, to get in touch with Xlers.
Kim

Dear XLer,

Over the years XLRI has always taken pride in its strong Alumni Network and its importance in defining the image of the Institute in the Corporate world. In order to further strengthen this relationship, we are pleased to inform you that an Alumni Cell has been constituted by the students. The key objectives of this cell include:

Promotion of interaction between Alumni and the current student batches
Consolidation of Alumni information and creation/maintenance of an updated database that is easily accessible and can be a quick reference for all XLers
Coordination of Alumni Meets that will be held during the Summers and Alumni Homecoming celebrations
We seek your help to consolidate as well as update the current Alumni Database.
You are requested to verify your details mentioned below as well as those of your batchmates whom you know.
Any information regarding XLers from other batches is also welcome.

Kindly let us know about your expectations from this Alumni Cell, feedback on past Alumni Meets held during the Summers and suggestions/ queries We look forward to your valuable inputs.

Warm Regards,
The XLRI Alumni Cell (alumnicell@xlri.ac.in)

Batch
Program
Title
First Name
Last Name
Designation
Company/Institution
Country
Location (City)
Mobile
Telephone (O)
Fax(O)
Email (O)
Telephone (R)
Email (Personal)
Address (Contact)
Address (Permanent)

Thursday, March 3, 2005

Domino CEO - Ajay Kaul (89BMD)

news item from Economic Times (March 2, 05), reports:

"It’s the year of homecoming for the Fredies (Foreign Returned Desi Executives).

So it wasn’t surprising when Coca-Cola India announced Vikas Gupta as its marketing head recently. He comes back after a five-year stint at Atlanta. Mr Gupta follows many other Fredies who have come home in the last few months.

They include the high-profile CEO of Britannia , Vinita Bali, Whirlpool MD, Arvind Uppal, Pepsi’s marketing head Punita Lal, and the new Domino CEO Ajay Kaul, who has been moved from Indonesia to head the pizza major’s Indian operations."

(the news about Vikas Gupta (88BMD) was already covered in an earlier posting)

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Dawn to Dusk Cricket mela on Mar 6 & March 20th!!! Chennai

Great news finally for all CRICKET LOVERS and FANS……. We are having a one day DAWN to DUSK cricket tournament this coming SUNDAY, 6th March, 2005 at the MAYAJAL CRICKET GROUND on the EC Road, just past the TOLL PLAZA.



Details are as below:



The 4 Participating teams are : XLRI, IIM-(A), IIM-(C) and a mixed team from the alumni of IIM-(B),(L) and (Kozhikode) institutes.
The trophy up for grabs will be the last year’s WINNERS Shield and RUNNERS UP Cup, the current holders of which are IIM-(A) and XLRI respectively.
The matches will be played on a 15 overs basis per side, each bowler will be allowed 3 Overs, each batsman to retire on reaching 25 runs, each wide ball bowled will be counted and 2 runs granted to the batting side. In case a team still has overs left to play and batsman at the crease is out, then any batsman who had retired earlier on reaching 25 runs will be allowed to return and bat on with the remaining batsman at the crease till the full quota of 25 overs is completed.
The schedule of matches shall be decided by draw of lots and shall be as below:


TEAM A vs TEAM B ---- starting time 7.45 am
TEAM C vs TEAM D ---- starting time 10.15 am
Winners of Match 1 vs Winners of Match 2 --- 12.45 pm
Losers of Match 1 vs Losers of Match 2 ---- starting time 3 pm if enthu still persists to play for the 3rd and 4th position.


Breakfast and lunch will be arranged for all participants at the venue on cost sharing basis. Beer is also available from MAYAJAAL on payment basis by respective individuals.
It is suggested that car pools be formed to transport all players and SUPPORTERS to the venue and back.
A combined alumni get together will be subsequently held at Madras Cricket Club on 20th March, 2005 wherein the various TEAM and Individual Prizes for best bowler, best batsman and best fielder shall also be distributed.


All XL alumni reading this, please pass on this news to others who may not be on the email yahoo group. Also very importantly, those interested in playing especially from the 1999 batch onwards please contact me or Tommy Philip.Equally important, we need cheerleaders to keep the ancient bodies moving on the ground !!! So ladies (oops girls) do come in numbers to cheer us. Transport will be laid on for all players and cheerleaders.

Hope to see lots of XLers in numbers at the MAYAJAAL ground on 6th March, 2005

Ciao,

Murali( XL – 84)

LG Ramaswamy