The Hindu Business Line : Infosys sticks to revenue guidance; looking for buyouts

New Delhi, Nov. 17 Infosys Technologies on Monday termed the current global environment as “difficult and challenging” but said it is sticking to its quarterly and FY09 revenue guidance for now.

The Bangalore based company — which had bowed out of the race to acquire UK consulting firm Axon Group after HCL Technologies’ higher offer — is also scouting for acquisitions of up to $700 million in areas such as consulting, SAP implementation and BPO, and geographies including Europe and Japan.

“We all know that the environment is challenging and the impact is not just on financial services but spreading to other parts of economy. And it is global, so it is not just the US. We had factored in some of these things when we gave our guidance for the second half of FY09.

“We do not have an update in the middle of the quarter unless something significant has changed, and it has not…The next time we give a guidance it will be at the end of Q3,” Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO of Infosys, said on the sidelines of the India Economic Summit.

Infosys, last month, cut its dollar revenue guidance for fiscal 2009 by six percentage points. It now expects revenues to be between $4.72-4.81 billion. Also the company has given a third quarter revenue guidance of $1,175-1,220 million. However, a recent report by CLSA had suggested that Infosys may miss its dollar revenue guidance for the quarter, and may even post a sequential fall in the quarter.

Mr Gopalakrishnan further said Infosys is still looking for buyouts. “We are looking for companies that make strategic sense where we can integrate the entity and grow,” he said.

Infosys had made a bid for buyout of Axon late-August, by putting a £407 million offer on the table. However, HCL trumped that bid with a 650 pence a share offer, an 8 per cent premium over Infosys’ offer.