The country’s largest IT services firm TCS reported a 7.8 per cent year-on-year growth in profit for the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2019 at ₹8,428 crore compared with ₹7,815 crore amid a global economic slowdown due to Covid-19. Net profit fell 0.85 per cent to ₹8,049 crore during the January-March quarter compared with ₹8,118 crore in the October-December quarter.

Rajesh Gopinathan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, said the company is going through a storm, which will get worse before it gets better. “The pandemic completely reversed the positive momentum that we had started seeing in some of our biggest verticals in the first half of the quarter,” he said.

Likening the last few weeks to the financial crisis, Gopinathan said the peak impact will be in the next quarter. While he clarified that TCS was not giving a guidance, the impact due to the global lockdown will be similar to the financial crisis in 2007-08.

For the whole year 2020, profits stood at ₹32,911 crore, a 3.2 per cent growth compared with ₹31,886 crore in fiscal 2019. On a sequential basis, profits grew by 3.4 per cent.

Revenues for the Mumbai-headquartered firm for the whole year were ₹161,541 crore, a 7.1 per cent increase compared with ₹150,774 crore in 2019 fiscal. Revenues in the March-ended quarter were ₹40,684 crore, a 3.7 per cent growth when compared with ₹39,203 crore in the same period last year. This growth was led by deal wins which were valued at $27.9 billion.

In the 2020 fiscal, TCS will give a final dividend of ₹6 per share and, for the whole year, ₹37,702 crore of cash has been returned to shareholders in the form of dividends.

No hikes, no retrenchments

For the year, TCS added 24,179 employees and had free cash flow of ₹32,303 crore. However, in the backdrop of Covid-19, TCS said it will not give any salary increments to its employees. The company said it will not retrench people and will honour all recruitment offers.

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