Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is bullish about business from the domestic market. TCS’s India business will pick up, owing to increased technology adoption and spending in the coming months by the newly-elected BJP government, TCS CEO N. Chandrasekaran told reporters here on Saturday.
“We expect the current fiscal to be better than FY14 for the company,” he emphasised.
“I expect the India business, which has been soft for some time, to pick up with the kind of decisive mandate we saw yesterday [Friday]. I do think the domestic market will pick up. The new government will adopt technology faster and also the corporate sector will pick up,” he said, even as he cautioned that these were “early days” and gave the government time till September to settle down and start making an impact.
Mr. Chandrasekaran added that he also expected the corporate sector to look up, thus anticipating an increase in private and public spend in the coming months. He said that TCS would continue to bid for all large-scale government projects. However, when asked about the Aadhaar project, he desisted from commenting on specific projects.
He said: “It’s too early to talk about specific projects, but it will suffice to say that in a country of our size we are going to see significant adoption of technology and the new government will definitely adopt technology.”
Reacting to Friday’s trend, which saw IT shares dip on the back of a sliding rupee, he said that some appreciation on the rupee was expected. “But we do not know where the rupee will be and what kind of margin pressures it will give. I’ve always said that a volatile rupee and a highly depreciating rupee is not good. As long as it is not volatile and even if it appreciates and stabilises in a narrow band, we will be fine.”
TCS, he said, would continue to grow on the people front — from 300,000 to an addition of 50,000, of which 25,000 campus have already been made. “We have the right skills, and more importantly we’ve been able to retain them,” he said, alluding to the fact that competition has struggled this year with attrition. At 18 per cent, close competitor Infosys, the third largest IT services exporter, touched record levels of attrition this year. TCS had given a hike of 8-14 per cent to its employees last year, the highest among industry peers.
