Yesterday, Infosys ended a period of speculation and announced it had appointed its next CEO and MD, Dr. Vishal Sikka, who had resigned early last month from SAP, where he was a former board member.  Dr. Sikka’s selection as Infosys' next CEO had been touted by the Indian press soon after the news of the resignation of BG Srinivas, who many had felt had been one of the two top [...]

NelsonHall recently attended CGI’s global analyst event in London. The key messages in CEO Michael E Roach’s keynote were the success with which CGI is executing on its "Buy and Build" profitable growth strategy and that the expected benefits of the merger are now becoming more visible. At the same event last year, CGI indicated some of the measures it was applying to impr[...]

IBM announced today a new portfolio of cloud-based offerings called IBM Cloud Business Solutions. Now the last three words don’t in themselves give away too much as to exactly what is on offer - but IBM is taking assets from across IBM Group, including consulting services from GBS, pre-built assets from IBM Research, IBM software, advanced analytics, and cloud infrastructure delivered v[...]

NelsonHall recently attended a NIIT analyst and advisor event in London. If we compare NIIT’s recent topline performance with some other IT services providers who report in Rupees, its revenue growth in FY 2014 of 14%  (to Rs. 23,050m, or just below $400m)  is on a par with Wipro (16%) and Hexaware (17%: of a similar size to NIIT, with Rs. 22,853m revenue in CY 2013), and far ou[...]

NTT DATA Moves Away from Holding Company Approach to Be More Region-Centric as it Pursues International Growth NTT DATA Inc. recently held its first ever analyst day in Boston. For those readers who may not be fully up to date of where NTT DATA Inc. fits into the NTT DATA organization: NTT DATA Inc. is the North American subsidiary of Japanese-headquartered NTT DATA, the largest IT services [...]

Let's start with some positive takeaways about the performance of Xerox Services in Q1: The commercial healthcare BPO business experienced “strong” revenue growth and margin improvement ITO revenue was up 4.4% y/y and also saw margin improvement Document outsourcing was up 0.8%. Overall BPO revenue declined 1.9%, impacted by the runoff of the student loan contra[...]

TCS has announced that it has signed an agreement with Mitsubishi Corporation (MC) to merge TCS Japan, IT Frontier Corporation (ITF), MC’s 100% owned IT subsidiary, and Nippon TCS Solution Center (NTSC) as a single new entity in which TCS will have a majority 51% stake and MC 49%. The transaction is expected to close by end June 2014. The new entity will have over local 2,400 employe[...]

TCS and Infosys have both now reported their Q4 and full FY 2014 results. A quick look at their respective revenue numbers (not to mention margins, utilization and attrition rates) highlights very significant difference in performance across geographies, service lines and industries, with TCS surging ahead across the board, in many of them at a level that is simply breath-taking.  [...]

NelsonHall recently attended an Atos analyst summit which provided a follow-up to the 2014-6 three-year plan first outlined last November (see our blog “Atos Unveils 2016 Financial Objectives”). As a reminder, the financial targets for IT services are: 2014-2016 CAGR of 5% with half of this growth to come from acquisition A 100 to 200 bps improvement in adjusted operating margi[...]

Lockheed Martin (LMT) has acquired Beontra AG for an undisclosed sum to enhance its civil aviation capabilities. Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, Beontra is a provider of integrated planning and demand forecasting tools for airports for traffic, capacity and revenue planning. It has 40 clients including Dubai, London Heathrow, Sydney, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Schiphol and Munich airports. [...]

NelsonHall recently attended an HP analyst summit in Boston, where our interest was focused on developments at HP Enterprise Services (HP ES). HP ES has room to breathe again, but the next few years will be at least as tough as the last two have been. Financial progress to date against turnaround program In its FY 2013 (ended October 31, 2013), the ‘Fix and Rebuild’ year of its t[...]

A Capita-led consortium has been selected by the U.K. Ministry of Defence (MoD) as preferred bidder for a ten-year contract with a potential LTV of £400m to be the strategic business partner to the Defence Infrastructure Organisation's (DIO, the MoD's property and services provider). Services to be provided by the consortium include manageme[...]

Infosys has been awarded a five-year renewal through June 2019 of its F&A BPO contract with Philips. There is no significant change in contract scope or direction in the renewal, largely a recognition that Philips and Infosys are part way through a major program of change in the way that Philips carries out its finance and accounting operations, including a major change in Philips[...]

Capita has been awarded a nine-year, £325m framework contract to deliver the Scottish Wide Area Network (SWAN), a single public services network (PSN) for the use of all public service organizations within Scotland. Capita will be delivering the services in partnership with Updata. Around £110m of Capita's revenues will come from four clients that have already signed u[...]

Genpact has just released Q4 and full year 2013 results. In terms of revenue performance, Q4 was back to double digit y/y growth, albeit at just 10.0%. Global Client revenues were up 13.3% y/y, but this the lowest Global Client growth rate for some time. Full year 2013 Global Client revenue growth of 16.4% was led by the BFSI, Life Sciences and Hi-Tech verticals. Q4 2013 operating margin was[...]

This was another quarter of margin expansion for CSC, across all three reporting segments, driven primarily by cost takeout efforts, which have been huge. And cash flow is improving: FCF guidance for the full year has been revised upwards to ~$600m. FY 2014 has also been a year of rebuilding the portfolio, with partnerships a key element. FY 2015 will be a year when we should begin to see growt[...]

Xerox Services financial performance in Q4 and full year 2013 had some clear positives. Looking at signings: Full year 2013 signings were up 20%, with BPO and ITO renewal rate at 92%, above the target range of 85% to 90% and 7 points higher than 2012. And new business signings was up 9% in BPO and up and up 23% in Document Outsourcing (DO) In Q4 2013, overall signings TCV was flat y/y w[...]

Wipro results this quarter show an ongoing improvement: topline growth is continues to improve and operating margin is the highest it has been for two years. Clearly, it still has a way to go to catch up with Indian growth rates (NASSCOM guided on 14% this FY), let alone with TCS. This quarter, Wipro achieved an operating margin of 23% and $101m in y/y topline growth; TCS achieved an operating mar[...]

Another very strong quarter from TCS, with no hint of the slight slowdown in growth that we have seen at Accenture (for its November quarter) and Infosys. If we look at where the growth is coming from: The more established ADM services (where Infosys took its eye of the ball in FY 13) contributed an estimated $173m in additional revenue, or 35.4% of the y/y growth of $490m. (Infosys achie[...]

There are clear positives to this quarter’s results from Infosys, and its share price certainly picked up (is now the highest since March 2012), though it continues to look to address a number of challenges, some of which are company-specific issues. This is the third quarter of improved topline growth. Management has raised revenue guidance for full FY 2014 to growth of 11.5-12% (up from[...]