Indian IT companies like Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL Technologies and others have taken the buyback route to return some wealth to their shareholders, while potentially boosting their stock prices.
The bulk of the erosion in terms of value took place in India's most-valued firms. For instance, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries alone has lost Rs 3.8 trillion in m-cap, followed by HDFC Bank, which has seen its value erode by Rs 2.45 trillion and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which has lost Rs 1.85 trillion to stand at Rs 6.24 trillion, making it India's most-valued.
The combined market valuation of eight of the top-10 most valued companies zoomed Rs 190,571.55 crore last week, with Bajaj Finance emerging as the biggest gainer, reflecting bullish investor sentiment. While Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) witnessed erosion in their market capitalisation, rest of the eight companies including Hindustan Unilever Limited, HDFC, ICICI Bank and Bharti Airtel emerged as gainers. The market valuation of Bajaj Finance jumped Rs 35,878.56 crore to Rs 2,63,538.56 crore, becoming the biggest gainer among the top-10 most valued firms.
Shares of HCL Tech hit a fresh record high of Rs 1,118.55 on Friday, up 2 per cent on the BSE in intra-day trade, surpassing its previous high of Rs 1,101 touched on Thursday in intra-day deals.
Together with its share buyback worth Rs 16,000 crore completed in January this year, TCS shareholders will receive a record Rs 30,250 crore from their company in FY21.
The market valuation of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) jumped Rs 31,294.89 crore to Rs 8,25,149.40 crore while Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) added Rs 28,464.11 crore to take its market valuation to Rs 11,33,168.55 crore.
The spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has made Indian companies persist with their policy of banning overseas trips and allowing only essential travel within India. The IT services firms, which had planned to ask their employees to return to the workplace, are also waiting and watching the Covid-19 situation before fully opening up their offices. Large conglomerates like the Tatas, Birla, JSW and Reliance are continuing with the mandatory social distancing and masking policies within their office premises.
In 2017, when Infosys announced that Salil Parekh would be its next chief executive officer (CEO) and managing director (MD), very few in the industry or the analyst community doubted his ability to bring the company back to a healthy growth trajectory, improve morale within the company and, more importantly, win the promoters' trust and investor confidence. There were reasons for this confidence. He was not only the deputy CEO of the Paris-headquartered IT services major Capgemini, but also one of the only non-European faces on the executive board of the company.
TCS' customer focus has been central to its recent success.
The Tata group companies are now more valuable than all the listed central public sector undertakings (CPSUs) or companies in the country. The key 20 listed Tata companies ended the 2021 calendar year with a combined market capitalisation of Rs 23.36 trillion, ahead of the 70 listed CPSUs, which had a combined m-cap of Rs 23.2 trillion. In comparison, these CPSUs had a combined market capitalisation of Rs 16.7 trillion at the end of December 2020 against the Tata group firms' combined m-cap of Rs 15.7 trillion.
Its revenue grew 3 per cent year-on-year to Rs 40,135 crore for the just-ended quarter from Rs 38,977 crore in the year-ago period.
Together with the firm's partly-paid shares that were issued in the recent rights issue and are traded separately, the company had a combined m-cap of Rs 13.5 lakh crore or over $181 billion.
TCS had replaced RIL as the most valued firm more than four years ago but a sharp rally in the shares of the Mukesh Ambani-led firm in the recent past has helped the company close the gap.
Russian and Indian companies including TCS and JSC Helicopters signed 3 different agreements to set up JV and strengthen technology partnerships.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Friday reported a 14.1 per cent rise in consolidated net profit to Rs 9,624 crore in the September 2021 quarter, aided by broad-based growth across geographies and verticals. The Mumbai-based company had logged a net profit of Rs 8,433 crore (excluding adjustment towards a legal claim) in the year-ago period. Its revenue grew 16.7 per cent to Rs 46,867 crore for the September 2021 quarter from Rs 40,135 crore in the year-ago period.
'IIM Ahmedabad has seen one of the best placement seasons ever and this change can be attributed to the markets opening up after the pandemic.'
India's largest IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Wednesday said its shareholders have approved its up to Rs 16,000 crore share buyback plan. Last month, TCS' board of directors had approved a proposal to buy back up to 5,33,33,333 equity shares of the company at Rs 3,000 per scrip for an aggregate amount not exceeding Rs 16,000 crore. "....the members of the company have duly passed the special resolution approving the Buyback," TCS said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. The voting, which started on October 20 and ended on November 18, saw 99.57 per cent of the votes being cast in favour of the buyback offer.
Major IT firms such as Tata Consultancy Services, HCL Technologies, Infosys, Cyient, and L&T Technology Services have direct exposure to Boeing or its suppliers' ecosystem, which comprises engine manufacturers, body suppliers, and avionics providers. These firms provide services like application development, testing, engineering, avionics, and business process management for the Boeing 737 Max programme.
Though a weak dollar will lend some support to revenues and margins in FY21, the demand environment will outweigh any gain.
While Tata Consultancy Services, HUL, ITC and Infosys saw a rise in their market capitalisation (m-cap) for the week ended Friday, RIL, HDFC Bank, HDFC, Maruti Suzuki India, SBI and Kotak Mahindra Bank suffered losses.
The revenue also rose 14.2 per cent to Rs 29,305 crore (Rs 293.05 billion).
Slide in the rupee, surging oil prices, and rising bond yields have triggered the latest fall in the market.
Industry experts are of the opinion that the spurt in recruitment happened as IT services firms went aggressive on hiring in anticipation of a strong demand environment.
At the same time, seven companies from the coveted list witnessed a decline in their market valuation last week, but their cumulative loss of Rs 37,701.1 crore was less than the total gain made by three firms.
There's no place like home, but even for the affluent buying one in India is difficult. On top of that, the coronavirus pandemic-now in its eighteenth month-has made life uncertain. A hopeful thing is buying a house looks alluring as loan interest rates fall below 7 per cent, their multi-decadal lows. The slow decline in GDP growth after demonetisation, followed by the economic shock caused by Covid-19 waves, has hurt us unevenly.
TCS CEO and MD Rajesh Gopinathan said the company believes the coronavirus impact has "bottomed out" and that TCS should now start tracing its path to growth.
Ajit Mishra, vice president, Research, Religare Broking, answers your queries.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has weathered the pandemic very well, and has earned tremendous goodwill from customers, which enhanced the firm's standing in the market, N Chandrasekaran, chairman, said in his virtual address of the 26th Annual General Meeting on Thursday. He said TCS shareholders received over 3,000 per cent return on their investments since the company was listed in 2004.
ONGC had dethroned Tata Consultancy Services from the pole position in market-valuation charts on Wednesday, but its leadership position proved to be short-lived and it slipped to the second position in today's trading session.
The company attributed the cut in guidance to the macroeconomic uncertainties.
Since August 9, RIL shares have gone up by over 11 per cent.
The move may result in a short-term cost impact for IT Indian companies, according to experts, despite the firms ramping up their local hiring and offshoring projects elsewhere to overcome visa-related issues.
While Infosys has increased the margin guidance for FY21 by 100 bps to 24-24.5 per cent, analysts believe there will pressure on near-term margins as discretionary cuts - promotions and travel, headcount addition, record utilisation, and wage hikes start to reflect on costs.
After Singapore this is the second such nodal office opened by the new group chairman.
The IT services giant is also slated to hold a board meeting on April 13 and 14, to approve of and take on record the consolidated financial results of the company for the quarter and year ended March 31, 2021. Indian IT majors will be announcing their fourth quarter (Q4) and 2020-21 results starting April 12. At the end of the Q3 FY21 Infosys had cash and investment of $4.5 billion.
The rally in mid- and small-cap stocks has spilled over into the IT sector as well. Second and third-tier IT stocks, which historically traded at a discount to the big five IT companies, are now trading at nearly 25 per cent premium to their large-cap peers. The smaller IT companies have a price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of nearly 38 times against the big five's current P/E multiple of around 31x.
TCS has been Three UK's partner for 15 years, working with a variety of business units and has been instrumental in supporting the company's ambition of becoming the world's first telco to host all its applications entirely on the public cloud.
Total of 11 private Indian firms have made it to the list of 500 most valuable companies across the world, and the country is ranked 10th on the chart, as per a report. The total value of these 11 companies grew 14 per cent and has been pegged at $805 billion or nearly a third of the Indian GDP. All these companies in the list of non-state enterprises have gained in value during 2020, which was hit by the pandemic, barring tobacco major ITC and second largest private sector lender ICICI Bank, as per the 'Hurun Global 500' report.
In the domestic m-cap ranking, TCS was at number one position followed by RIL, HDFC Bank (Rs 666,533.49 crore), HUL (Rs 400,325.83 crore) and HDFC (Rs 378,236.52 crore).
Revenue of the Mumbai-based firm grew 6.7 per cent in the quarter under review to Rs 39,854 crore from Rs 37,338 crore in the corresponding period of the last fiscal.