'Will have 50K fully trained to leverage GenAl by FY25'

Among the large IT players, HCLTech's fourth quarter performance in FY24 has been industry leading. The firm's revenue guidance of 3-5 per cent growth for FY25, though soft compared to its FY24 figure, is still strong against Infosys' 1-3 per cent. C VIJAYAKUMAR, chief executive officer (CEO) and managing director (MD), HCLTech, in a video interview with Shivani Shinde and Ashutosh Mishra, says that its challenger position is working in favour of the firm. Edited excerpts:

Fourth quarter FY24 performance looks really soft. Could you just walk us through what happened during the quarter? Also, despite a strong total contract value (TCV), the guidance for FY25 is also on the softer side.

When we started FY24, there was cautious optimism around growth in line with the market momentum at that time. There were signals of reduced discretionary spends and slowdown in some key verticals. We as a company reacted to that with agility and flexibility. For FY24, our revenue growth was 8.3 per cent and our services business grew 5.4 per cent. These are industry leading. Our services performance in Q4 has been very strong and software has a seasonality issue, so that impacts the performance. For guidance, we've assumed a similar discretionary spend environment in FY25 as compared to FY24.

Do you see things improving during the next two-three quarters? What's the sense that you're getting from clients and customers?

In some verticals, we definitely feel confident that things will improve. But in others, I'm still assuming, at least in the next couple of quarters, things may not.