Infosys Braces To Face Twin Challenges Of Clients


Infosys Braces To Face Twin Challenges Of Clients
Bangalore: India's IT bellwether Infosys Ltd is bracing up to face the twin challenges of commoditisation and scalability from its global clients under its new management. "With demand shifting from horizontal offerings to industry-specific offerings, our clients are looking for transformation partners to help them reduce capex (capital expenditure) by converting it into opex (operational expenditure) to increase their RoI (return on investment," Infosys' new chairman K.V. Kamath said Saturday. In his maiden address to shareholders at the company's 31st annual general meeting (AGM) of fiscal 2011-12 here, Kamath said Infosys had embarked on 3.0 version to address the twin challenges and enable it to achieve high quality, and industry-led growth. "Our building tomorrow's enterprise strategy continues to see good traction with our clients as we are executing it with our 3.0 version. We have to, however,align our offerings closely to the business priorities of our clients," Kamath told the investors. Keeping in view the paradigm shift in clients' business requirements, the global software major has re-grouped its service offerings into four heads - financial services and insurance, manufacturing, energy, utilities, communications and services and retail, consumer packaged goods, logistics and life sciences. "We are confident that this new strategy will help the company in become more relevant to clients and will help in driving superior growth in the future," Kamath asserted. Allaying apprehensions of some shareholders who expressed concern over the blue chip's performance and operations during the fourth quarter (January-March) of the fiscal under review (FY 2012), Kamath said even in the face of an uncertain global economic environment the company grew 23 percent year-on-year (YoY) in topline (revenue) and posted 22 percent YoY growth in net profit, with operating cash flows growing at 24 percent YoY. "We are building our consulting and systems integration business that combines with high-quality offshore systems integration. We are also into cloud (computing) in a big way with over 140 engagements and 3,000 cloud experts and investing in focused solutions and intellectual property (IP) to offer greater value to clients." The absence of co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy at the AGM was felt conspicuously, as this is the first time that as chairman emeritus, he could not be present as he was away in the US. He had never failed to preside over the company's annual meetings regularly over the past 30 years. In accordance with the company's retirement policy, Murthy retired from the board Aug 21, 2011, paving way for Kamath to take over as chairman and former chief executive S. Gopalakrishnan being elevated to the newly created post of co-chairman. The $7-billion company doled a whopping 47 per share of 5 at par as total dividend, including a final dividend of 22 per share, a special dividend of 10 per share and an interim dividend of 15 per share in October 2011.
Source: IANS