Date:13/03/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/03/13/stories/2007031319140500.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

Firms snap up the entire IIMB batch

Staff Reporter

233 students were placed in 90 Indian and international companies

Finance and consultancy emerged popular

Sixty students have been offered positions in overseas locations

BANGALORE: Anxious moments for the students of the Indian Institute of Management are over.

The five-day final placements programme, which ended Saturday, succeeded in placing the entire 233-batch in 90 Indian and international companies, many of them coming for the first time.

Popular

Finance and consultancy emerged popular among this batch with each accounting to 32 per cent, while 14 per cent of the offers were for marketing positions and nine per cent for investment banking. Interestingly, the last was the most popular among last year's students.

Providing the break-up of offers made to the remaining students, Vikram Balan, second-year student, said: "Offers from information technology companies comprised 8 per cent and 5 per cent was from other sectors."

Overseas positions

Sixty students have been offered positions in overseas locations such as New York, London, Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Dubai, Trinidad and Kuwait.

Five graduates rejected pre-placement offers (PPO), while 25 students have taken them up.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) took part in the campus placements at Bangalore for the first time and has offered positions of business analysts to two students.

Deepak Goyal, a second year MBA student, has been offered the position of vice-president in Sun Group, a leading private equity fund in India.

Remuneration

Continuing with the tradition established during 2005-2006 final placements, IIM-B authorities refused to divulge the remuneration packages. "We do not want to provide any statistics than can lead to calculations," said a professor.

However, Mr. Vikram Balan said, the salaries are comparatively higher than what had been offered to students last year.

Trends

Putting the graduates on a par with the leading B-Schools in the world, prominent investment banking firms have offered associate positions to the graduates for the first time, putting them on an equal platform along with their peers in international B-schools such as Yale, Wharton and Harvard.

This year's placement programme also witnessed the participation of a large number of companies from the West Asia, which offered consultancy positions.

Among the many multinationals that participated in the placement programme, companies such as Arthur D. Little, Al Ghanim Industries, CiC International, Audex Group, Actis Group, Sun Group, Tesco, Fidelity, Gartner and BASF were on the campus for the first time.