Published on February 18, 2020
Ahmedabad:
In times of slowdown, IIM-Ahmedabad students are shying away from entrepreneurship. In final placements held for the batch of 2020, only two out of 380-plus students chose to be entrepreneurs.
In fact, this is the second consecutive year where the number of students opting out of placement process to pursue businesses of their own have remained stagnant at a dismal two.
After peaking at 14 entrepreneurs in 2014, the number has constantly declined, according to Indian Placement Reporting Standards (IPRS) of IIM-A.
A senior IIM-A faculty member told TOI that market uncertainty is the obvious reason. “IIM-A runs IIMAverics, a summer programme to support students wishing to explore their business ideas, which is aided by CIIE.CO, the entrepreneurship and incubation hub. Here also, the numbers are falling with only four students opting for summer placement at CIIE-.CO in 2019,” said the faculty.
“We were hoping that successful ventures in the past couple of years by IIM-A alumni would prove to an inspiration. But funding issues and overall volatile market condition may have prevented students from taking the leap of faith.”
CIIE.CO officials said that some of the ventures such as Circles, BitesASAP, Finception, Hyve and Flexiple examples of successful ventures that came out of IIM-A in the past few years. Many of these have got funding/ investment from national and international firms.
Plenty of Big Names Participate
Ahmedabad: Some of the major names in the process this year were Accenture Strategy, Boston Consulting Group, Kearney, Bain & Co., KPMG, McKinsey & Co. and Monitor Deloitte . in the management consultancy domain.
Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and JP Morgan were in the investment banking domain.AB InBev, Airtel, Asian Paints, Dabur, ITC, Lenovo, Nestlé, P&G, Wipro, etc.in consumer goods/services/ electronics sector, Aditya Birla Group, CK Birla, RIL and Tata Administrative Services in the general management cohort, and American Express, Bajaj FinServ and Liberty Insurance in banking and financial services. A total of 38 new companies participated in the process this year, including Blackstone Group, Colgate, Diageo, HCL Technologies.
IIM-A Placements: 27 McKinsey offers
Ahmedabad: Bucking fear of a slowdown in the global economy, McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy major, made 27 offers to IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) students who were part of PGP 2020 final placements. According to IIM-A sources, this figure is the highest for the firm at IIM-A and also the highest among the top IIMs this year.
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) was second highest with 23 offers, cementing management consultancy as the top choice for IIM-A grads, in line with the trend over the past few years. Close to 400 students were placed over three days.
Other major recruiters were TCS with 12 offers, MasterCard and FinIQ with 11 offers each, Avendus and Amazon with 10 offers each, JP Morgan and AB InBev with 8 offers each, Airtel and Microsoft with 7 offers each and CK Birla Group with 6 offers to name a few. A total of 153 companies participated with 182 different roles in 20-plus cohorts.
Prof Amit Karna, chairperson of the placement committee at IIM-A, said that given the economic scenario, they were apprehensive about the results.
“The outcome has not only been more positive than expected, but also better than in previous years,” he said. “With our consistent record of producing high achievers, we continued to attract several new recruiters expanding our recruiter pool considerably.”
He added that about 40% of the batch exercised the ‘dream application’ option that allowed them to sit for interviews even after having an offer from one cluster.
Sharp Decline in Foreign Placements: Sources said that this year there were three foreign roles offered, in Australia, Malaysia and Middle East. The number is down from 13 in 2019 and 16 in 2018. Sources said that many times domestic recruitment also has region-specific roles and thus the absolute numbers could be higher.
Will the slowdown affect the pay packages?: Sources involved in the placement process said the good response from industry and top names could translate to slightly better pay packages for the 2020 batch compared to 2019. “While we are yet to get absolute figures, we are hopeful of a better median CTC (cost to company) than last year. Several top B-schools are struggling with placements and attracting recruiters this year. We are thus satisfied with the outcome,” said a senior IIM-A official. In 2019, the highest domestic MEP (maximum earning potential) was Rs 70 lakh per annum and international MEP was US $ 117,631.
Parth Shastri Archive 