IT services company Wipro Ltd on Wednesday reported about a 21 per cent year-on-year fall in its consolidated net profit to Rs 2,563.6 crore for the first quarter ended June 2022. The profit for the period (attributable to the equity holders of the company) stood at Rs 3,242.6 crore in the year-ago period. The net profit was down 20.6 per cent on a year-on-year basis, according to a filing.
Cognizant Technology Solutions has restructured its global growth markets (GGM) by appointing two internal leaders who will now share the responsibility. The move follows the exit of former GGM leader Rob Walker last month and is among the slew of leadership changes the company has seen in the recent past. GGM refers to the company's emerging markets outside of North America.
India's information technology (IT) sector will witness subdued hiring in 2023-24 as macro uncertainties impact demand environment, with clients either taking a pause on spend or stopping discretionary spend, say human resource experts. To begin with, unlike earlier years, the three large IT players TCS, HCLTech, and Wipro have not provided any new hiring targets for the financial year. And Wipro has said that its hiring target will depend on the demand environment.
'MNCs now recognise India's capacity for innovation and its pivotal role in substantive contributions to global product development.'
Information technology major Infosys and Liberty Global, a London-based telecom firm, signed a 1.5 billion (about $1.64 billion) deal for five years to evolve and scale up the telco's digital entertainment and connectivity platforms, the companies said in a joint statement on Tuesday. As part of the expanded collaboration agreement, the size of the contract will touch 2.3 billion (about $2.5 billion) if extended to 8 years. The collaboration allows Liberty Global to realise run-rate savings of over 100 million (about $109 million) per annum, inclusive of other savings and technology investments, Infosys said in a statement.
American banking major Citibank on Thursday announced that it will exit from the consumer banking business in India as part of a global strategy. The business comprises credit cards, retail banking, home loans and wealth management.
An individual with a self-learning attitude is critical to surviving and growing in a competitive environment, says Narayan Mahadevan.
Amid persistent fear of prosecution and penalty, people across income classes are looking for ways to do away with stacks of higher denomination currency.
Fintech and venture capital firms such as Recur Club, Razorpay and Trifecta Capital have come to the aid of homegrown start-ups caught in the crossfire of the Silicon Valley Bank fiasco. Alternative funding platform Recur Club said it was allocating $15 million to all Indian founders affected by the crisis. It will not charge any platform fee for the same.
Unlike Israeli company NSO, whose sale of Pegasus cyber tech grabbed worldwide attention, and other manufacturers of offensive-cyber products, Cellebrite operates in a grey area between security exports and civilian ones.
'I was at Deepika's wedding at Lake Como, also at the receptions in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, and every moment was unforgettable.'
Bengaluru-headquartered IT services major Wipro Limited on Thursday announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Capco, a global management and technology consultancy to the banking and financial services industry, for USD 1.45 billion.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has deferred the diktat requiring foreign investors to disclose their mobile number, email addresses and income details to depositories, a move believed to be aimed at curbing practices such as round tripping and money laundering. "Based on the representations received from MIIs (market infrastructure institutions), Sebi has decided to extend the deadline for making 6-KYC attributes mandatory for new accounts opened by 1 month to July 1, 2021. "Participants are accordingly requested to take note of the above and ensure compliance," NSDL said in a note on Tuesday. The regulator is also meeting custodians this week to thrash out a solution and address investors' concerns.
More and more women are making their presence felt in jobs related to sciences, technology, and engineering across organisations.
Global professional services organisation Ernst & Young Services on Thursday said it will hire about 9,000 new workforce in India in 2021, in various technology roles across all member firms. These hires will be from the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) background and in areas including artificial intelligence, machine learning, cyber security, analytics and other emerging technologies, EY said in a statement.
Mindtree on Thursday said it will acquire the NxT Digital Business from Larsen and Toubro (L&T) for Rs 198 crore, a move that will enable the mid-sized IT firm to capture opportunities in the IoT and Industry 4.0 space. The acquisition would enable Mindtree to capture opportunities in the IoT and Industry 4.0 market by leveraging NxT Digital Business capabilities to cross-sell and create holistic solutions for new prospects as well as for existing clients, a regulatory filing said. Capability in this space will bolster Mindtree's vision to leverage existing digital strengths and aim to become a 'Go-to business transformation partner' for clients, it added.
For Paris-headquartered IT services major Capgemini, India has always been the backbone of its services delivery for its global clients, but the company is focused on driving more value from India as it gears up its engineering research and development (R&D) presence worldwide with its acquisition of Altran Technologies. The company, which has about 149,000 employees in India, is looking to hire 60,000 associates this year. Of them, 30,000 will be recruits from campuses and the rest lateral entrants. For Ashwin Yardi, chief executive officer India, Capgemini, the focus is to make sure that the India unit is aligned with the global plans of repositioning the company as a hub of engineering R&D, operational technology, and IT.
Hinduja Group's business process management entity, Hinduja Global Solutions Limited (HGS) said on Wednesday that it has entered into definitive agreements to divest its Healthcare Services business to funds affiliated with Baring Private Equity Asia (BPEA), at an enterprise value of $1.2 bilion. The deal is subject to closing adjustments, and is expected to complete within 90 days, subject to shareholder and other regulatory approvals. "The cash that will come in as a result of this transaction will be deployed to growing the business as well as looking at buying some capabilities...where capabilities are important for being able to do a good job of customer experience transformation.
The candidates will be selected through a National Qualifier Test. The top 1,000 will be offered a much higher salary -- almost double of that being offered to peers.
As more and more businesses move towards digital technology-enabled solutions such as chatbots to increase interaction with their own customers, BPM companies have seen a significant chunk of their revenue proceeds shifting towards business outcomes.
At a time when investors are preferring higher-risk investment products like thematic and small-cap mutual fund (MF) schemes, some fund houses are exploring the possibility of going further down the market-capitalisation (m-cap) ladder to unearth newer investment opportunities. HDFC MF had filed papers with the capital markets regulator - the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) - earlier this year for an active micro-cap scheme. Some more fund houses are keen on launching such schemes, say industry observers.
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.
'At present Metaverse is a hype cycle.' 'If it succeeds, then I would like to see TCS there, too.'
A Goldman Sachs report said, in the past also, major crisis have led to a sharp increase in outsourcing and even offshoring particularly to India , thanks to lower wages for technology developers as compared to developed economies, and an increasing annual base of engineering graduates.
IT company Wipro on Friday posted a 4 per cent rise in consolidated profit at Rs 3,092.5 crore in the fourth quarter ended March 2022. The company had registered a profit of Rs 2,974.1 crore in the same period a year ago. "We have had an outstanding year, finishing with USD 10.4 billion in revenues, and an industry-leading growth of 27 per cent Year-on-Year (Y-o-Y).
'We have focused on profitable revenue, cash generating businesses, throughout our journey.'
'Every time a new tech comes in, there are a set of people who will predict that this will be the end of Indian IT and every time the Indian IT industry and overall technology providers have proven to be resilient.'
As Indian IT service entities mature into multi-billion dollar organisations employing thousands, the pressure has increased on them from clients to identify and solve customer problems than working on predefined parameters.
With the Big Four information technology services players having disappointed the Street, the focus is on mid-cap IT players who seem to have met expectations, according to analyst reports and management commentary on the demand environment.
Ambani is in good company. The likes of ultra-rich individuals like hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio and co-founder of Google Sergey Brin have chosen Singapore to establish their family offices. So have British inventor James Dyson, famous for his bladeless fans and hair dryers and vacuum cleaners, and Zhang Yong, founder of China's Haidilao hotpot restaurant chain, reports Lee Kah Whye.
Engineers based in India are estimated to be writing roughly 35 per cent of the 100 million lines of codes required to develop one fully driverless car for global vehicle makers.
The regulator has asked portfolio managers not to leverage the portfolio of clients for investment in derivatives and not indulge in speculative transactions that are not accompanied by actual delivery, except for derivatives trades. This is done with the intention of reducing volatility in the market and curbing undue risks.
Canada and Mexico emerge as preferred destinations to service clients in the US; east Europe and Nordic nations are favoured alternatives
As IT midcap stocks ride high, it has created speculation around a potential bubble with analysts picking the midcaps' client concentration as the biggest concern area.
With a narrow industrial base and dysfunctional politics, and a counter-productive national security agenda, Pakistan could well remain an 'international migraine', observes T N Ninan.
In January, Visa's chief executive officer, Al Kelly, said during an earnings call that "there's been a burst of the balloon in valuations in the fintech world". Noting that the trend of lower valuations "is a helpful characteristic of the current environment", he added: "We will look for capabilities and management teams that will bring more value to Visa than we can bring ourselves." Data from KPMG's Pulse of Fintech H2'22 shows that global fintech investment - via mergers and acquisitions (M&As), private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms - at $164.1 billion in 2022, was down 31 per cent over the year before. Indian fintechs held up better during this timeframe, attracting $6 billion, or a fall of 24 per cent.
The application makes it easy for IBM partners and clients like Polaris to build an entirely new class of cloud-based social business apps.
Software major Tata Consultancy Services on Wednesday reported a 14.8 per cent rise in net income to Rs 11,392 crore for the fourth quarter of last fiscal against Rs 9,959 crore in the year-ago period. The country's largest technology services company by market value said its revenue rose 16.9 per cent to Rs 59,162 crore during the reporting season from Rs 50,591 crore a year ago.
Indian start-ups raised issues, such as blockages in international wire transfers, disruptions due to threshold limits on withdrawals, lack of communication from US agencies, and the need for preferential access to credit, in a meeting with the government over the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and information technology, held a virtual meeting with over 450 members from start-ups, venture capitalists, and investors who have been directly affected by the closure of SVB. He assured them that the IT ministry would put together a list of suggestions and give it to the finance minister on behalf of start-ups.
'It is a sign of a bigger problem which is coming in the next six months.'
