Return gift: Infosys to give stocks to staff on 30th birthday

All employees of India's second largest information technology services company, Infosys, will get a stock bonanza on its 30th birthday on July 2.

Infosys and its subsidiaries had 113,796 employees at the end of March.

At Wednesday's closing price of Rs 2,788 a share on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the value of bonus for each employee will be Rs 13,940. At this price, the total value of the bonus works out to Rs 32 crore (Rs 320 million).

The largesse is being doled out by the Infy Employee Welfare Trust -- an independent trust within the company which holds the corpus of equity shares of Infosys.

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A statement by the trust said all those on Infosys rolls as on March 31 this year, and who are not under notice period, will be eligible for a minimum of five equity shares, with an incremental allocation of one equity share for each completed year of service in the company.

The distribution of shares will take place in August. The company, however, did not disclose the quantum of equity shares held by the trust.

Infosys created the welfare trust to allocate shares to its employees. The company makes contributions to the trust. The employee generally does not pay for these shares. At certain periods, employees are given the option of converting options to stock at pre-determined prices.

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Infosys, which had seen it's attrition shooting up to 13.4 per cent in the quarter ended March 2010, from 11.6 per cent in the previous quarter, had given a raise of 14-17 per cent to all it's Indian employees with effect from April 1, 2010.

For overseas employees, the effective salary raise was in the range of 2-3 per cent, according to the company.