‘Europe, US still considered growth markets’

HCL Technologies has come up with yet another quarter of positive results.

According to analysts the IT major is clearly proving to be one of the major beneficiaries in the vendor consolidation exercise going on in the industry.

Anant Gupta, President and Chief Operating Officer, HCL Technologies, in an interview with Business Line spoke about how the company is confident of continuing the momentum. Excerpts:

What’s the reason for the company’s success quarter after quarter?

It is about balanced portfolio strategy. It is no rocket science … it is all about having a grip of the market, being clear that there is potential and just going after that. What we put forth as a plan in the total outsourcing space is fuelled by both first-time outsourcers and renewals. We participated in markets not fiercely chased by other players.

We continue to focus on such markets and participate aggressively. Not only in winning, but our whole strategy around investing in transition, customer referral, their satisfaction and execution so that we can reap the benefits. That is the real strategy and looking at how value is delivered to the customers – from initially when we sign a contract and what we can do more in continuation.

There is a churn market opportunity of $273 billion between October 2012 and December 2014 in the IT space as per a TPI report. How confident are you of winning the maximum deals?

We are as confident as we were. The confidence level to execute continuously remains the same and therefore there is no reason why we should be less confident. The confidence is coming from ‘can you do it’ and not from something in the air. Yes, we took early risks on investments in growing businesses earlier, but they pay off.

However, the competition continues to be stiffer and global multinational-level companies will continue to defend their forte and their own propositions. It is a continuous exercise.

But, the likes of Accenture and IBM are competing with you for such deals.

For us, it goes to a simple philosophy of the same thing: employee first – because you need a continuum of how do you have the most enthused and enabled people working. That continues to be the ‘mantra’.

Our management philosophy of trust and transparency in our engagements continue to be the ‘key mantra’, which we believe is not easy to make and build.

As long as we are able to retain that culture of demonstrating our relationships on a daily, weekly basis, it should stand us well.

Do you still see the US and Europe as HCL’s best markets?

We continue to see them as growth markets, largely driven by Continental Europe. Their conservativeness in outsourcing to a non-local player is shifting. All sectors such as utilities in the US also, where they were in-house-focused, have opened up. BPO continues to track well – our strategy on not focusing on voice side (pure call centric), the focus is on non-voice now. Increasing the value of more deliverables, where it can impact most, continues to do well from a growth perspective. Engineering services and enterprise application services are more driven by discretionary spend and continue to be subdued.

>ronendrasingh.s@thehindu.co.in

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