An Infinite Business Venture

S.D. Shibulal
Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Infosys

What will be your company’s strategy towards growth with a consistent pace and creating wealth for your shareholders?

We are focused on the Infosys 3.0 strategy through which we look at three aspects. Firstly, we continue to invest in large outsourcing projects in the business IT Services space, which cover areas such as Application Development Maintenance, Infrastructure Management Services and Independent Validation Services. Secondly, continuing to grow with the linear relationship between revenue and number of people is not sustainable in the long run, therefore we are working towards Product, Platforms and Solutions that will help us create a non-linear relationship between revenues and people. Thirdly, we want to get a larger share of revenue from transformational projects that provide us better margins. We have about 32 per cent to 33 per cent of the revenue coming from transformational projects.

How do you plan to deal with higher wage pressure and other problems such as immigration bill reforms?

 In the last nine months, we have given employees two wage hikes, six to eight per cent and five to seven per cent. In the long run we will continue to look at wage hikes above industry standards to mitigate wage pressure. On immigration bill reforms, Infosys is focused on the longer-term benefits of immigration reform, such as policies that will attract and retain the best tech talent, make more H-1B high-skilled visas available and allow the global economy to flourish.

What are the growth drivers for your company and the overall industry?, going forward?

 Across the board and the industry, clients are looking at cutting cost and trying to reinvest back in terms of consumer facing activities, front-end activities and driving growth. At Infosys we are focused on ensuring we have industry leading growth, and superior margins. We have doubled our growth rate from last year to this year. Last year our growth was 5.8 per cent, and this year in constant currency terms that is 12.4 per cent. We have also narrowed the difference between our growth rate and the industry growth rate. We have had very strong client additions and added 238 new clients (gross) and we have given a guidance of 7.9 per cent. Having said that, we have to still accelerate our growth, we still have to look at every opportunity which is there in the marketplace which will help us continue to invest back in the business. 

Our focus on Cloud, Big Data and Mobility is helping us showcase our capabilities to clients. Across advanced technologies, we see sustained business momentum with 20 new deals signed for Cloud and Big Data offerings and 50 new deals signed for Infosys Mobility offerings.

How does your company stand apart from other industry peers? What is your company’s market position in the domestic market? 

We are looking at opportunities in the domestic market where India contributes 2.6 per cent (including Finacle) to our revenues. The Infosys India business unit was formed in 2007 to focus on the domestic IT market and tap in to the opportunities that India offered. The unit has been closely associated with private and public sector IT initiatives to help scale up to their growth ambitions and has also partnered with the government in their e-governance and financial inclusion DS initiatives.