The year seems to be promising for corporate employees with HR consultancy firm Hewitt Associates projecting that employers are set to dole out highest salary hikes this year in the entire Asia-Pacific region at 10.6% on the back of strong economic recovery and buoyant business sentiment.
What?s more, the homegrown companies are expected to be more benevolent in announcing increments compared to their multinational counterparts. The hikes given out by MNCs may be bogged down by weaker recovery back home and gloomy business sentiments. This is at a time when salary hikes in other economies of the Asia-Pacific region such as China, Japan, Singapore, Australia and Thailand could be restricted in the range of 2.1 to 6.7 %.
HR experts, however, advise a hint of caution while reading the prediction at face value. ?Without factoring the inflation movement of respective economies, the projected hikes by themselves do not tell the full story. How good a hike is can only be arrived at when you know whether your cost of living has gone up and at what rate? Gurdeep Hora, director, Synergy Consultants told FE.
Hewitt feels that energy, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) and automotive would be the drivers of the salary growth by announcing the most generous increases, which could range between 11.6% and 12.8%. Technology and outsourcing sectors, despite witnessing tremendous recovery in 2009, are expected to play a cautious game by announcing single digit salary increases between 8.5 to 8.9 %.
