HCL Tech's GenAI Pivot

As the second-longest serving CEO of HCLTech, C. Vijayakumar leads the company's tech offerings in the Al/GenAl era.

- Rukmini Rao

C.VIJAYAKUMAR or CVK as he is popularly known is HCL Technologies second-longest serving CEO after founder Shiv Nadar. Since he took over in 2016 (and appointed MD in 2021), HCLTech’s revenue has almost doubled from $6.9 billion in FY17 to $13.2 billion in FY24.

In the last fiscal, HCLTech grew the fastest among India-headquartered IT service firms at 5% on a constant currency basis while peers TCS and Infosys grew 3.4% and 1.4%, respectively. The company also saw increased free cash flow of 27.7%. On a YoY basis, while IT and business services grew 6.2%, engineering services grew 1.6%.

The last fiscal was a rather difficult year for the IT industry, as clients squeezed discretionary spends. HCL’s digital business (which relies heavily on discretionary spends) portfolio (which contributes to 37% of revenues), saw a 5.3% YoY increase with Cloud transformation and cyber security along with the company’s SaaS services clients aiding growth. “What worked for HCL is the all-weather portfolio that has discretionary, non-discretionary and IP products,” says CVK.

The changes in the macro environment led to changes in IT industry buying patterns with discretionary spends directed towards efficiency and optimisation deals. Explaining why the all-weather portfolio is at the centre of its growth, CVK says, “In a good macroeconomic environment, when customers are looking for new capability, the discretionary part of the portfolio grows very well. During difficult times, we have a very strong non-discretionary set of offerings like operations, landing, mission critical infrastructure, doing engineering, product sustenance and all of that becomes much more amplified”.