HCL Tech Q4 net up 3.8% at Rs3,154 cr

The IT major had a reported a profit of Rs3,037 crore in the October-December 2019-20 quarter.

While the corona virus pandemic failed to impact HOL Tech’s Q4 performance, the company said there could be certain short-term challenges like clients deferring new projects and volume-based billing impact on account of Covid-19.

HCL Technologies' CEO on Thursday said the company is expected to get 15,000 freshers onboard in 2020 but it will be placing lateral hiring on hold.

In the wake of coronavirus, many customers have reduced operations and some projects are getting postponed, said C. Vijayakumar who is also the President of the IT services firm.

Lateral recruitment is the process of hiring an 'expert' for a job role that needs to be filled.

Vijayakumar said the company's customers are seeking cost reduction in projects for next one or two quarters and that the company is "very flexibe in providing short-term relief".

Vijayakumar said the company is seeing both kind of impacts - "pockets of good demand in weak verticals" and "weak demand in strong verticals" given HCL Tech's mixed portfolio mix.

"... we do not see this pandemic influencing our multi-year engagements beyond the short term, our efforts of building strong relationship with our clients, most of them are fortune 500 or global 2000 brands, with very strong and sustainable business model gives us that confidence that in the long term they're intact but in the short term there could be some challenges," he explained.

Rupee revenue from operations for the quarter rose 2.5 per cent to Rs18,590 crore, against Rs18,135 crore in the previous quarter.

Earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) stood at Rs3,881 crore, while EBIT margin was at 20.9 per cent.

Dollar revenues of the company remained unchanged at $2,543 million.

Company's attrition rate was at 16.3 per cent against 16.8 per cent, while gross addition was at 10,278 versus 11,502, QoQ.

For the fourth consecutive year, HCL delivered an industry leading growth of 16.7 per cent year-on-year in constant currency in FY’20. Sequential revenue growth was 0.8 per cent in constant currency for Q4 FY’20.

For the fiscal, IT and Business Services grew at 12.7 per cent, the ERS business grew 12.8 per cent and Products & Platforms grew 60.5 per cent, in constant currency.

HCL surpassed 150,000 employees in FY’20 and now proudly stands at 150,423 at the end of FY’20 and operates out of 46 countries across the globe.

Towards the end of March, HCL Technologies said 76 per cent of its India-based employees and 92 per cent of employees in other geographies were enabled to work from home. The company has not witnessed any outages or major disruption in operations with this newer format of work from home delivery.

It also said exposure to the more impacted verticals were not significant. Its exposure to verticals like Oil & Gas, Travel & Hospitality, High-End Retail is in single digits.