Anant Gupta, the newly appointed president and chief executive officer of HCL Technologies, has taken over from Vineet Nayar at a time when despite a decline in global growth, the Indian outsourcing industry has shown resilience and is growing. He tells Kirtika Suneja that his focus will be to drive the already growing businesses of the company and redefine the market with its alternative outsourcing model. Edited excerpts:
What will be your priorities and which new blue oceans have you identified?
My focus will be on what is going good for us like the employees first policy and making it more current and making the frameworks to complement our global diversification. It is largely business as usual but we want to adapt the alternative outsourcing model in other areas of transformation led BPO, focus markets and scale it up in the engineering services business. The engineering and R&D services is still not a large market and we are exploring it through sourcing partnerships. We see market opportunities in 42 areas.
How does the environment look, especially when your peers have also shown good results this quarter?
The year 2012 was exceptional for us, though it was challenging for the industry. Our performance has been consistent though the discretionary side is yet to see a major shift. Moreover, the big bets on large engagements are yet to crack in and customers are still treading with caution. We are working on the alternative outsourcing model as a strategy and next gen BPO.
What fulled growth in this quarter?
Our growth this quarter was driven by infrastructure and financial services, both growing in excess of 10% sequentially. Six large transformational deals have once again given us a billion dollar booking quarter. On the back of this industry-leading performance HCL is now ready to redefine the market with its alternative outsourcing approach which consists of business-outcome aligned IT services delivered through alternate delivery models.
How healthy is the deal pipeline?
We won 12 deals in which the discretionary and non-discretionary services were bundled. The market that we are looking at is the renewals business. The market is worth $200 billion for deals up for renewals by 2015 in the IT, infrastructure, application outsourcing and BPO space combined. However, our interest lies in the core business of manufacturing, financial services and media planning with respect to asset heaviness.
Is inorganic growth also a part of that strategy?
Our balance sheet is strong and appetite is not the issue. We do not want to buy market share if we are getting it organically. Any acquisition will be to fill in the gaps in our competence and geographies. So there is no change in aggression.
