HCL Technologies has come out with another good set of numbers at a time when global economy is still gloomy. The net income margin expanded by 400 basis points and touched a five-year high of 16 per cent.
During the fourth quarter ended, the company has booked customers amounting to more than $1 billion, including 12 multi-year deals from Fortune 500 and global 2,000 clients. In an interview with Business Line , Anant Gupta, President and CEO, shares more on the company’s game plan ahead and what is been his experience as the leader of the company. Edited excerpts:
You took over as CEO almost six months back. What are the big challenges that you have come across?
It’s still early days in the journey. It all depends on the right set of team – whether it is leadership or senior management team — that makes a lot of difference. We were structured appropriately prior to this in terms of matrix of the organisation – relevance of industry verticals, of our horizontal services and client side – all helped in making sure that there is value at leadership level.
Challenges are always how one keeps making sure that the value proposition is relevant for the market and balancing between quarterly numbers and not getting bogged down.
Your revenues from rest of the world were lower this quarter on YoY basis. What was the reason?
The Europe grew faster than any other regions. Through the year, Europe has developed a lot more given that the pent up demand was much higher there. Americas normally tends to move faster on outsourcing, but historically there were cultural or social issue.
How is the business model changing given that the technology is moving rapidly?
If I draw a medium term on where it is moving, penetration of cloud operating model is happening. The movement from on-premise applications to software of the cloud, shift of infrastructure in own data centres, some on others’ data centres are realties. The shift will not happen suddenly. It will be on hybrid model and therefore, we are going to re-look at all our service execution – right from blueprinting to implementation to operations. The human volume may reduce, but the complexity will increase, that is how we see it. We will also have to look at multiple ways to reduce cost through automation, root cause and event co-relation engines. Changing the status quo of the way what is being done is an imperative.
When do you see the market opening up?
The renewal market is strong and decisions would be there. We have seen significant growth in the results and it will continue. In the rest of the world, we are selectively playing where we want to play, where we can replicate those models. We have to discover the sweet spot.
What is your take on the visa issues? Earlier, it was around the US and now the UK…
The bigger impact is more around how do you deliver a multi-vendor programme if the customer wants to be from one side like ours. I think they will go through their senate version and figure out what are the priority areas.
Historically, we were never looked at movement of talent as a vehicle to deliver business. We have a track record of hiring locally.
Have you hired freshers who were protesting on you not giving them joining dates?
It is going on track as we said. We have recruited around 1,800 freshers during the last quarter.