Raymond, India's branded textile company, on Friday said it plans to cut about 10,000 jobs over the next three years. The jobs will then be replaced with robots and automation technology.
The Mumbai-headquartered firm said that the company has a workforce of 30,000 staff across 16 manufacturing plants in India.
"Roughly 2,000 work in each plant. Through technological intervention we are looking to scale down the number of jobs to 20,000 through multiple initiatives in technology. One robot could replace around 100 workers. While it is happening in China at present, it will also happen in India," Sanjay Behl, CEO of the Raymond Group, was quoted as saying by the Economic Times.
In addition, Behl also said that the sector was very manpower intensive.
Mohandas Pai, former member of the board of directors of Infosys, said that the automation would lead to about 10 percent of jobs being snip off each year in the IT sector and about half of mid-level managers would suffer from the impact in the new era of artificial intelligence.
The ET cited US-based research firm HfS as highlighting that the Indian IT industry could lose up to 6.4 lakh employees to automation over the next five years. In the service sector, the $160 billion IT industry is the biggest employment generator.
Raymond Group is an Indian conglomerate. It was incorporated in 1925 and its managing director and chairman is Gautam Singhania. The group owns other brands such as Raymond, Raymond Premium Apparel, Park Avenue and Park Avenue Woman. The company has 700 retail outlets spread across 200 cities worldwide.
Shares of Raymond closed at Rs. 476.75 on Friday, up 2.70 percent from their previous close on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
