The results season for Indian IT services exporters is usually heralded by Infosys.
This time around, the Infosys PR team from Adfactors sent out an email invitation on Saturday morning to journalists to attend the company’s financial results for the third quarter of FY 2015 ended December 31, 2014 on Friday, the 9th of January at the usual time - 12.30.
However, later on the same evening, another email invitation was sent out at half past five which was followed up with a call to inform journalists that the company had decided to announce the results at 4 pm on Friday, the 9th of January followed by high tea. On being asked why, the PR team said, it was an internal decision by the company to do so.
India’s third largest software services exporter, Wipro started the trend for rescheduling timings of financial results announcements to after market hours.
Wipro had shifted to announcing results on Friday evenings - 5.30 pm to 6.15 pm six quarters ago, from Q1 of FY 2014 ended June 30, 2013 from the earlier results announcement format starting at 12 noon followed by lunch, analyst call and one-on-one interviews with journalists.
Now, Wipro starts with high tea, results announcement followed by dinner and schedules media interviews with management the next day (Saturday).
The delayed timing, which is outside of market hours is to ensure that there are no negative fluctuations or volatility in share prices which is usually the case if the company does not report numbers that match street expectations.
It is not clear whether Infosys will schedule media interviews with the management after the results announcement and analyst call.
In the meanwhile all investors and analysts are training their sights on Infosys with high expectations from its new, non-founder CEO, Vishal Sikka, who took over the reigns of the company on August 1, 2014 and brought in a number of sweeping changes to the company, beginning with continuous engagement with the 1.6 lakh Infoscions.