Zensar Technologies took a knock on the back of weak Q3 earnings with profit falling 21 per cent. However, the company is unfazed by the dismal Q3 as April-December numbers are still robust -- revenues are up 12.6 per cent and profits up 23.9 per cent. Speaking to Bloomberg TV India, Zensar Tech vice-chairman and CEO Ganesh Natarajan says the company has an order pipeline of over $500 million, mostly on the digital and e-commerce business. Excerpts

What led to the dip in revenues in Q3?

There are two things. One, two of our large clients had furloughs of 7-10 days during December. Second, is in our projects business — enterprise ERP projects — we had two very large projects that finished at the end of the second quarter. So, obviously, it was less this quarter. Apart from that sequential profit decline was more because there was a currency swing of ₹14.8 crore. So, all these together contributed to lower revenues.

But in terms of year-to date (YTD) we are doing fine. If you look at the YTD number at the end of 9 months, revenue is up 12.6 per cent and profit 23.9 per cent. Things are still looking in good shape.

The enterprise business has been facing pressures. Where is the weakness coming from and are you expecting the business to recover? If yes, when are you expecting the recovery and in how many quarters do we see that?

Absolutely, whatever we were talking about was for the enterprise business. Both the customer furloughs are for the enterprise business. Both the large projects that finished at the end of the second quarter are also for enterprise business.

And the good news it is that not just recovery but the continuing business trend. We have a project pipeline of over $500 million and a lot of it is digital. We are now finding that digital is moving mainstream. And the kind of work we are doing in digital and e-commerce is multi-million dollar deals. So I think that is going to be the key driver of the business going forward and you will see it smartly moving up this quarter and beyond.

That is the perspective on enterprise business. But revenues from the digital business have been supporting growth last quarter. Do you expect that is something that will sustain in the coming quarters? Can you give us an outlook on that?

Just to give you a sense, most people’s digital business started with some migration to cloud, some small mobility work, etc. For us, just to give you an example, we are working for a very large client on an over $12 million project.

It is a full fledged e-commerce platform of a very large retailer. The second one is a very large retail commerce project we finished about three months back. That has translated into a multi-year maintenance and enhancement deal.

So what is happening with us is that because of our early moves in digital — we have been working on it for almost four years — many of our projects are now mainstream projects.

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