Infosys Technologies Limited (BSE: 500209, NASDAQ: INFY) is a multinational information technology services company headquartered in Bangalore, India. It is one of India's largest IT companies with over 100,000 professionals (including subsidiaries) as of Sep 30, 2008. It has nine development centers in India and over 50 offices worldwide. Its annual revenues for the fiscal year 2007 - 2008 exceeded US$4 billion with a market capitalization of over US$14 billion. According to Forbes, Infosys is among the world's top 1000 companies in 2009 (top 20 in software and services, 7th largest by market value) and among the top 500 in terms of profits and market value.[ It also rated Infosys among the 130 "global high performers" of the year which means it is among the 5 best performing companies in the software and services sector in the world making it the only Indian company in the group. Infosys was founded on July 2, 1981 in Pune by N. R. Narayana Murthy and six others: Nandan Nilekani, N. S. Raghavan, Kris Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora,with Raghavan officially being the first employee of the company. Murthy started the company by borrowing INR 10,000 from his wife Sudha Murthy. The company was incorporated as "Infosys Consultants Pvt Ltd.", with Raghavan's house in Model Colony, north-central Pune as the registered office. In 1982, Infosys opened an office in Bangalore which soon became its headquarters. Infosys went public in 1993. Interestingly, Infosys IPO was undersubscribed but it was "bailed out" by US investment banker Morgan Stanley which picked up 13% of equity at the offer price of Rs. 95 per share. The share price surged to Rs. 8,100 by 1999 making it the costliest share on the market at the time. At that time, Infosys was among the 20 biggest companies by market capitalization on the Nasdaq well ahead of Adobe, Novell and Lycos. According to Forbes magazine, since listing on the Bombay Stock Exchange till the year 2000, Infosys' sales and earnings compounded at more than 70% a year. In the year 2000, President of the United States Bill Clinton complimented India on its achievements in high technology areas citing the example of Infosys. In 2001, it was rated Best Employer in India by Business Today. Infosys won the Global MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises) award, for the years 2003, 2004 and 2005, being the only Indian company to win this award and is inducted into the Global Hall of Fame for the same. Infosys was rated best employer to work for in 2000, 2001, and 2002 by Hewitt Associates. It continues to expand, actually growing by more than 1,000+ people per month.[In 2007, Infosys received over 1.3 million applications and hired less than 3% of applicants. Infosys currently has almost 100 Fortune 500 clients with over 90% repeat business. BusinessWeek reported that Infosys, along with Wipro and Tata accounted for nearly 80% of the [H-1B] visa petitions approved in 2007 for the top 10 participants in the program.
