HCL Tech Q3 net profit up 13% at Rs 2,944 cr

IT major HCL Technologies on Friday posted a 13% rise in its consolidated net profit at Rs 2,944 crore for the December 2019 quarter and said it expects to clock up to 17% growth in FY20 revenue on the back of pipeline being at a "historic peak".

The company had registered a net profit of Rs 2,605 crore in the year-ago period as per Indian Accounting Standards. Its revenue from operations grew 15.5% to Rs 18,135 crore in the quarter under review, from Rs 15,699 crore in the year-ago period.

"We have once again delivered a great quarter...this quarter, we have crossed an annualised run rate of USD 10 billion. Our pipeline stands at an all-time high, we are expecting a higher conversion of this pipeline to booking in this quarter," HCL Technologies President and CEO C Vijayakumar told reporters here.

The company's CFO Prateek Aggarwal said the company has narrowed its revenue growth outlook to 16.517% for 2019-20 in constant currency terms, from its previous forecast of 15-17% topline growth in constant currency terms.

"We had earlier guided to a wider range of about 15-17% but now that we have only one quarter to go and we have better visibility, we have narrowed down the range...it is coming from both sides - organic and inorganic," he added.

Compared to HCL Technologies' performance, Wipro had posted 2.2% growth in its IT services revenue (USD 2.09 billion). It expects its March quarter IT services revenue growth to be flat to 2%.

HCL Technologies' larger rival Infosys - which announced its results last week - had also revised its revenue guidance for the fiscal to 1010.5% topline growth helped by double digit growth yearto-date.

India's largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Services announced its results on Friday. Posting a 6.7% rise in topline in December 2019 quarter, the Mumbai-based company said it had closed deals worth USD 6 billion during the said quarter. However, TCS also made it clear that it will not be able to notch a double-digit revenue growth in FY20.

For HCL Technologies, the strong performance of HCL Software was driving growth for the Products and Platform segment of the company.

"Inorganic guidance was 56% earlier and that is now at 6%. For organic, which we had said would be 10-11%, now we are revising to 10.511%," Vijayakumar explained. Vijayakumar said during the December 2019 quarter, the company had entered into a preferred business partnership with Google.