If summer placement at the XLRI here is any indication of the way the Indian economy is going, it is surely the financial and the consulting sectors, including hedge funds for the first time, which were busy recently lapping up around 48% of the B-School’s 2008 summer internship batch.

Realising XLRI’s strength today in finance & economics as it has an enviable strength of 20 faculty members devoted to this segment alone, recruiters like Lehman Investment Banking, Lotus Asset Management and traditional recruiters like JPMC, the Carlyle Group, Edelweiss, Rabo Bank, HSBC, Citibank, Standard Chartered, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and SBI Capital Markets took away as much as 27% of the batch.

The B-School has been the first to experience the presence of hedge funds at any B-School recruitments so far as 8 Capital Hedge Fund and Indea Capital slated their thirst from the 180-strong batch XLRI had on offer.

The consulting sector was not far behind as it picked up around 21% of the batch for the 2008 summer with offers coming from KPMG Consulting, Ernst & Young Human Capital, Hay Group, Hewitt Associates, Mercer Consulting, Accenture Business Consulting, Deloitte Consulting and IBM Business Consulting. New York-based real estate developer Tishman Speyers International Consulting and PricewWaterhouseCoopers were the icing on cake for this segment.

Said professor Uday Damodaran, chairperson of the placement committee, “Reflecting the changing preferences of both students and recruiters we found a larger number of students this year interested in taking up summer assignments in finance & consultancy domains”.

The FMCG-cum-manufacturing sector, which has been traditional favourites at the B-School, picked up as much as 37% of the students, with participation coming from companies like Asian Paints, Britannia, Cadbury’s, Coke, Colgate Palmolive, GlaxoSmithkline, HUL, ITC, Johnson & Johnson, Marico, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble, Pepsi and Reckitt Benckiser.

Stipends being offered for the two-month summer period (April-May 2008) too are astronomical when compared with earlier years.

Lehman Brothers offered as much as Rs 5 lakh as stipend. Others that offered more than a lakh were JP Morgan Chase, Hay and Microsoft.

Companies like Novartis, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, ABG, Proctor & Gamble, Transworld, Asian Paints and ICICI offered foreign assignments, with the highest foreign stipend being 5,00,000 francs.