Europe’s ongoing geo-political tensions have not affected Mindtree’s operations

The ongoing geo-political tensions in Europe have not affected the operations of IT services firm Mindtree as it does not have clients in the affected countries. The company has development centres in Europe and those have not been affected at the moment (due to the Russia-Ukraine crisis).

According to Debashis Chatterjee, CEO and MD, Mindtree, the demand scenario is good and it should support the overall growth of the IT industry. The company is hopeful of continuing the momentum of clocking a “profitable growth” in FY-23 as well. 

“The demand scenario is good, so overall, there should be growth for the IT industry. As an organisation, we have been focused on profitable growth and that vision will continue. We stabilised following the management change in 2019 and then again after the pandemic struck and we lost revenue from the travel, transportation and hospitality industry. Subsequently, we returned to the growth path in FY22. For FY23, the vision is to sustain this growth momentum,” Chatterjee said in an exclusive interaction with BusinessLine after inaugurating its first development centre in Kolkata recently.

Though the IT industry has been facing challenges on the supply side, the true differentiator for the company is how it has nurtured talent, looked at the overall talent supply chain, and created the right type of collaborative environment for its employees to ensure that they deliver for the clients “flawlessly”.

“We do not have any clients in the affected countries in Europe right now. We do have development centres in Europe, but those are not really affected right as we speak. Our immediate priority is to provide business continuity support to our customers affected by the developments. We are closely monitoring the situation,” he said.

Strategy to cross sell and upsell

The company, which at the beginning of the pandemic had rolled out a strategy of staying focused on key industry groups, service lines and geographies, is looking to cross sell and upsell within its focused list of accounts to be able to “mine those accounts better”.

“As we entered the pandemic, we had rolled out a strategy to focus on a specific set of industries, service lines and geographies. That strategy still holds good. We have added a few additional capabilities and one more industry group to the set, but overall, our strategic vision continues to be guided by focus. There is abundant demand. We want to stay focused in certain areas and cross sell and upsell within our focused accounts just to make sure that we can mine those accounts better,” he said.

Talking about servicing the clients, given that most transformation that is happening in clients’ environments is led by digital technologies and capabilities, Mindtree is focused on becoming a digital engineering powerhouse and providing digital engineering at scale to enable clients to accelerate their transformation. The new facility in Kolkata would continue to help develop its digital capabilities.

Kolkata was in fact “a natural choice” for the company to expand its presence because of the availability of talent in plenty and a good infrastructure. Though the pandemic delayed the plan a little, the company has been recruiting talent for its expansion in Kolkata since last year and has already onboarded more than 1,000 professionals. The company is looking to double the headcount in the next one year.

From Kolkata, the company is providing digital solutions, consulting, cloud, core modernisation, product engineering, business intelligence, data analytics, CRM platform, and cyber security services to some of the world’s largest retail, consumer goods, manufacturing, banking, financial services companies in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

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