New Delhi: Satyam Computer is ready to appoint over eight new employees a day for the coming six months with a goal to swell its headcount by more than 15,000 people by the end of the existing fiscal.

The India’s fourth largest IT services and BPO firm said that the majority of the new staff would be fresh college passouts.

In an interview to McKinsey Quarterly, Satyam Computer’s Founder and Chairman Ramalinga Raju said, “Our organisation has 40,000 people today and at the end of the fiscal year (March 2008) we will probably have more than 55,000. Many of the people we bring in will be straight from colleges.”

The company's projected 55,000-strong headcount would symbolize more than 10-fold increase in its employee strength of 5,067 in the year 2000.

The plan to hire skilled persons comes after fears that the situation in the US sub-prime market and the spiky rise in rupee versus the US dollar would gobble up the funds of Indian IT and BPO companies.

Stressing on the company’s vital task, to turn out to be one of the top IT services companies throughout the world by next three years (2010), Mr. Raju further told, “Our effort and investment has paid rich dividends... From an investor's viewpoint, $1,000 in 1992, when we went public, would have yielded $1 million by 2007.”

Satyam Computers also anticipates attaining annual profits of $1.9 billion in the existing fiscal that would be much higher from its $1.4 billion in the same period of the last year.

“We consider ourselves in the business of building leaders. The most effective way of realising our goals and objectives is to grow leaders faster than the competition. Taking a non-India-centric view in attracting leaders from all over the globe and growing existing leaders through focused leadership-development programme is paramount to our success,” Raju disclosed.