WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN BETTER PREPARED ON PROTECTIONISM: HCL CEO

While the Indian information technology (IT) sector worries about global protectionist measures, C VIJAYAKUMAR, president and chief executive officer at HCL Technologies, says he isn't sweating. Having surprised the market with a high growth forecast, he tells Karan Choudhury the reason why. Edited excerpts:

It has been three quarters since you took charge. What has changed and what has worked for you?

We identified a lot of potential to cross-sell and up-sell in existing customers. Creating a strong client partner model for the top 150 customers, we can channelise a lot of services into our clients. Some of the newgeneration services require multiple teams to work in a unified manner. Bringing this together and creating an end-to-end proposition is resonating much better with clients. We have got some of the key themes right.

The reason for this confidence?

We are evolving faster and accelerating a revolution into next-gen technology services. It started three quarters earlier, when I clearly laid out the mode 1, 2, 3 strategy, primarily to build a better groundwork, better revenues, costs and the right level of management attention to areas that would be relevant in the long run. We have grown 30 per cent over a year on mode-3 services.

There is rhetoric in the IT industry on protectionism. What you are saying is contrary. The reasons?

I am not contradicting protectionism; we have just been better prepared. We invested in global delivery centres seven years before. We have 12 such centres in the US alone and over 12,000 employees. As a percentage of local hiring, it is probably the highest in the industry. We have always been looking at how we can increase local talent. That is why 55 per cent of our employee base is local. We have been lot more pro-active. All this helped us.