The New Delhi-based NIIT Technologies has put its retail business on the backburner as part of its strategy to focus on high growth verticals only.

Though the company will not completely exit from retail, it will not commit fresh investments in a space where it has not been traditionally ‘strong', said Mr Arvind Thakur, Chief Executive Officer.

“During the downturn, clients consolidated with us in areas such as insurance and travel where we were strong while we lost out in the ‘not so strong' retail vertical. And, hence, we are no longer focused on the retail vertical and are instead looking at new fast growing segments like healthcare in addition to insurance and travel,” Mr Thakur told Business Line .

No fresh signings

The mid-size software company has not had any fresh signings in the retail space in the last year as it is content with maintaining existing customers.

Moreover, its ‘retail and manufacturing' segment has been rechristened as only ‘manufacturing', said Mr Thakur. However, he denied any plans of completely exiting the business.

Indian IT companies generally provide services related to application development, application support, customer relationship management and business intelligence to retailers such as Wal-Mart, Tesco, and Best Buy.

Analysts say that Infosys by large has the most dedicated practice in the retail vertical followed by rivals Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro.

“Most of the solutions required in the retail space are related to supply chain management which calls for an end-to-end bouquet of offerings…smaller players may not have that luxury and hence they tend to lose out to larger vendors which are aggressive in the retail space,” said Mr Rishi Maheshwari, Vice- President – Research at Enam Asset Management.

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