‘ R fall is not behind good results’
Barely a month-and-a-half after NR Narayana Murthy came back as Infosys’ executive-chairman, his stamp was visible in the company’s quarterly results. SD Shibulal, CEO and MD of Infosys, talks about Murthy’s influence and the company’s renewed focus on high growth. Excerpts: How will you rate Infosys’ quarterly results? Is rupee depreciation
behind the good performance? Our revenues in dollar terms have gone up by 2.7% from the last quarter (January-March, 2013). This has got nothing to do with rupee depreciation. Also, if you look at our (earlier) annual revenue growth forecast of 6-10%, we needed to grow somewhere between 0.5 to 2% quarter-on-quarter. But still we have grown by 2.7%. This is why I say that we have done reasonably well in this quarter.
Profit and revenues from Europe
are down quarter-on-quarter… You are looking at only on a quarter-on-quarter basis. Net profit is down on a quarterly basis only because in the last quarter we had some extraordinary income, which we do not have in this quarter. Similarly, in Europe, if you look at the last four quarters, the trend is up. In the last quarter, we had seen a spike in Europe that has evened out a bit.
It’s been around a month and half since Narayana Murthy rejoined as executive chairman. What has been his focus? His focus has always and definitely been on the growth and margins. And he has brought in renewed focus on these areas. Will focus on big data and cloud computing reduce reliance on onsite employment? There are two parts to this story. One is the consulting that we do “for” the Cloud that will continue to have the same onsite and offshore ratio. The second is about us offering services “on” the cloud that is done predominantly offshore. But today the percentage of offering from the second kind is very small. It has to improve over time. So, it will be incorrect to assume that big data or cloud will in some ways completely offset our dependence on onsite deployment of employees. At present it may offset some part of this dependency. Attrition levels have gone up marginally during the quarter. What are your hiring plans for this fiscal? We have 10,138 employees who have joined this quarter. We have extended 5,000 campus offers for this year who would join us post-September. So, we continue to have new employees. Our utilisation is still reasonably low and it doesn’t make to look at future recruitments.