HCL streaks past peers

(By Anthony Miller – Friday 28th August 2009 9:45am). Earlier this week the last of the India-based majors to report results, HCL, capped off its year (to 30th June) with a terrific quarter at nearly 8% sequential growth (to $607m), showing even Cognizant a clean pair of heels (+4%). This put HCL firmly past the $2b revenue mark ($2.18b to be more precise), a real milestone. Even at constant currencies (ccy) HCL grew 4% seq, with Europe (now of course including Axon) up 1.6% seq ccy, representing 29% of HCL’s global revenues. Operating margins grew 1.6 pts seq to 18.0% though this was 1.2 pts down yoy.

Perhaps slightly surprising, especially in the light of the Axon acquisition, was that HCL’s enterprise application services revenues shrunk very slightly (1%) in the quarter (ccy). In contrast, its flagship infrastructure management business grew 21% on the same basis – just a huge result – and now represents nearly 18% of the total. HCL acquired a US data centre recently to bolster its IM ambitions, and TechMarketView subscription service clients will be able to read more about that and HCL’s results in the next issue of OffshoreViews very soon.