We expect double-digit growth this fiscal, too: Ajoyendra Mukherjee

In the recently announced fourth quarterly numbers, TCS posted a double-digit growth in almost every division. Ajoyendra Mukherjee, EVP and Head, global human resources, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), speaks about the earnings, key takeaways, and also provided outlook for FY20 during an interview with Swati Khandelwal, Zee Business.

Excerpts:

Summarise the fourth quarter and the year (FY19), and let us know the key drivers of the growth?

Our CEO, Rajesh Gopinathan, has said that it was a picture-perfect year for us. We had a couple of large deals when we started the financial year. When it comes to growth, there was a huge disparity in different areas, i.e., at places we were growing very well, and at some places the growth was just in single digit as well as at the lower end of the single digit. But at present, the performance has been even and almost all business units that we have been into, on a year-on-year basis, have been posting close to double-digit growth or near to the average growth of TCS.  As far as a large market like the US is concerned, then it is close to coming to where we would like it to be.

Will this strong year growth continue in FY20, or will it be better than FY19? Provide an outlook on it?

As far as the outlook is concerned, we don’t provide future guidance in advance. Some of the indications like hiring this year are concerned, we have added net 29,000 people this year. And, if we look at the deal wins of the year, our deal wins in the fourth quarter were the highest in the last three quarters. So, overall, that gives us good confidence as far as it is related to the next year.

Banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) are the important vertical of your business. So, is it going to sustain, or it may face some challenges?

As far as BSFI is concerned, it was not growing in a way we wanted last year, and we said there were certain challenges. But going forward, we will be seeing growth as far as year-on-year is concerned. We have achieved double-digit growth for BFSI in constant currency terms. So, as a result, even retail, where there were issues, is also very close to double-digit growth. Interestingly, double-digit growth can be seen in large verticals and going forward the pipeline remains robust.

This means BFSI has crossed the problematic phase and will provide a positive outcome in time to come.

You have seen strong growth in the digital space. What is driving this optimism and will TCS remain ahead of the curve in digital space?

The technology pillars used in our business 4.0 framework is nothing but is digital. Now, all the organisations are going for digital technology and if they don’t use it then they will face problems in providing the experience to their customer and manage their own supply chain. So, they will have to have digital technology and move towards automation and IoT devices. Because of this, our digital business has expanded a lot because it is about 31% of our total revenue. So, it is a significantly large business at this point in time. The industry is moving in the same direction and because of it we will grow in the digital side. 

In this quarter and at the end of the year, we have 3,48,000 people who are trained and that is the largest pool that any organisation has. In a similar way, if we look forward to digital technology, then we have more than 11,000 people whom we have trained in digital technology and multiple technologies. So, that is something that is helping us in having that kind of core strength that can support us in large engagement.