TCS: Building On The Team Mantra

N. Chandrasekaran, CEO and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), prefers to keep his priority list short and simple. The man, who heads the country’s largest software services exporter, also believes in keeping his team strong and big to keep his company on a fast and steady growth path.

TCS, which recently celebrated its tenth year of growth after its listing, remained at the top in the BW Businessworld’s 2016 list of India’s fastest growing companies.

“With a strong team, you get a lot of things done. Apart from that, I try to keep my priority list always simple and short,” Chandrasekaran said at an industry meet in Mumbai recently.

Despite currency headwinds and a challenging industry landscape, the company scored an average growth of 26.1 per cent in sales and 27.6 per cent in net profit over the last 4 years. The current year (FY2015-16) has been tough for the company due to “seasonal” weaknesses, but Chandrasekaran is optimistic of reversing it before the year ends.

Broad Focus
TCS’s growth has been phenomenal on the back of deployment of one of the largest team of skilled workforce in the most lucrative markets of the world. It has also succeeded because of its broad as well as sectoral focus, and by virtue of adding high-value partnerships. The company has managed to keep attrition at the lowest levels compared to peers. However, its lower-than-expected growth during the last three quarters at an average of 10.77 per cent (in net profit) have turned industry analysts a wee bit sceptical of late.

Poor India Showing
India was a miss for the company during the last few quarters. TCS had in its analyst call in January said irrational behaviours by competition in addition to seasonal issues such as Chennai flood contributed to its weak performance.

“There is no reason why we will not do well. And we have no intention of not doing well,” Chandrasekaran said in a recent media interview adding that the fourth quarter will be better than the third for the company.

And, Chandrasekaran is paying close attention to the reason for the misses.

Opportunities In Digital
“We see tremendous opportunities in digital and we will fully participate to gain a few shares on the business side — whether it is analytics, Internet of things or digital marketing — we have all the partnerships. We will have strong partnerships in the startup ecosystem too as and when it is required. We have a strong partnership in the cloud ecosystem and we have our digital learning platform where employee retraining has been happening at a rapid pace,” he said in the interview.

Top Employer
Working to keep the team together has worked wonders for TCS. It was recognized as a top employer in the US for the second consecutive year by the Top Employers Institute early in March. TCS had a year ago spent Rs 2,630 crore offering a special one-time bonus to its employees to celebrate its tenth successful year after listing.

The company, with a total employee strength of 3,44,000 employees, is not deterred to talk of ramping up its global presence and team strength even further.

A significant milestone in this direction was the creation of a strategic joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan. Japan is currently the world’s second largest information technology (IT) market by spend and an important component of TCS’s global strategy.

The company succeeded in strengthening its presence in the Japanese market with 3,500 local associates, while many of its rivals are still struggling to plant their foot, mainly due to language barrier.

The software unit that contributes most significantly to the revenue of the $108 billion Tata Group has everything going for it since it is the beginning of an age where information technology is the new frontier.

unni@businessworld.in; @unni_ch