The company announced its results before market hours today, 12 July 2013.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE  Sensex was up 206.07 points, or 1.05%, to 19,882.13.

On BSE, 5,902 shares were traded in the counter as against an average daily volume of 1.43 lakh shares in the past one quarter.

The stock hit a high of Rs 2,779.40 and a low of Rs 2,779.40 so far during the day. The stock had hit a 52-week high of Rs 3,010 on 7 March 2013. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 2,101.65 on 26 July 2012.

The stock had underperformed the market over the past one month till 11 July 2013, rising 2.13% compared with the Sensex’s 2.78% rise. The scrip had also underperformed the market in past one quarter, sliding 13.40% as against Sensex’s 6.12% rise.

The large-cap IT company has an equity capital of Rs 287.12 crore. Face value per share is Rs 5.

Infosys  has retained its guidance of 6% to 10% growth in revenue in dollar terms for the year ending 31 March 2014 (FY 2014). The company has raised the guidance in rupee terms due to a steep depreciation of the rupee against the dollar. The company has forecast 13% to 17% growth in revenue in rupee terms for FY 2014, higher than its earlier guidance of 6% to 10% growth, which the company had given at the time of announcement of Q4 March 2013 results.

Infosys’ consolidated net profit declined 0.8% to Rs 2374 crore on 7.8% growth in revenue to Rs 11267 crore in Q1 June 2013 over Q4 March 2013. The results are as per International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Infosys Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Rajiv Bansal said that the company has announced compensation increases for FY 2014 effective July which will affect the company’s profit margins in the future quarters. Infosys CEO and Managing Director S. D. Shibulal said that the management is cautiously optimistic about rest of the year. Despite facing an uncertain macro environment, changing regulatory regime and a volatile currency environment, the company has done well in Q1 June 2013, he said.

Infosys and its subsidiaries added 66 clients in Q1 June 2013. There was a gross addition of 10,138 employees and net addition of 575 employees by Infosys and its subsidiaries in Q1.

Infosys liquid assets including cash and cash equivalents, available-for-sale financial assets, and government bonds were at Rs 24078 crore as on 30 June 2013, higher than Rs 23958 crore as on 31 March 2013.

Infosys is a global leader in business consulting and technology solutions.

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source: http://www.business-standard.com / Business Standard / Home> News-CM> Hot Pursuit / Capital Market – July 12th, 2013

Bangalore and Silicon Valley are set to simultaneously host their first joint hackathon, which will see over 200 developers working together to create new collaboration applications.

The two-day hack fest that links Silicon Valley and Bangalore is aimed at creating a new generation of open and innovative collaboration tools.

According to the Enterprise Innovation, these tolls will be built over new open APIs (application programming interface), including WebRTC.

Tata Communications  announced it would sponsor the ‘Future of Collaboration’ hackathon by providing 75,000 dollars in cash and prizes.

Tata said that by crowd sourcing the best minds across California and India , the hackathon provides a gateway to rapidly develop, prototype and innovate applications using new web standards to address everyday collaboration challenges, the report added.

source: http://www.business-standard.com / Business Standard / Home> News-ANI> Business / ANI / New Delhi – June 24th, 2013

Jun 13, 2013 (Menafn – Mint – McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX)

Wipro Ltd has hired former Lloyds Banking Group executive Ganesh Balasubramanian to create a new unit focused on banking products and platforms, as part of a move to shore up its banking and financial services business that has lagged rivals such as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp.

India’s third largest software exporter, which recently hived off its non-information technology business units and started trading as a stand-alone IT stock, has named Balasubramanian as senior vice-president of its newly created banking products and platforms business, according to people familiar with the development who requested anonymity.

Balasubramanian, who previously was the chief technology officer at Lloyds Banking Group, will take up the role in July and report directly to Wipro chief executive T.K. Kurien.

Soumitro Ghosh, who has headed Wipro’s global financial services business since 2008, will continue in his current role and report to Kurien.

Wipro, which gets more than a quarter of its revenue from the financial services business, confirmed the appointment.

“Wipro confirms that Ganesh Balasubramanian will join the company effective July 2013 as senior vice-president — banking products, BFSI in emerging markets and key strategic account relationship. Ganesh was previously with Lloyds Banking Group, where he played a key role as part of the Global CIO leadership team,” the company said in an email response.

India’s 108-billion IT sector gets nearly 40% of its overall business from the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector, where large clients like Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase outsource projects worth millions of dollars every year to Indian software vendors such as TCS, Infosys Ltd and Cognizant.

For more than two years, Wipro has lagged rivals like TCS and Cognizant and is struggling to turn around its performance in the BFSI segment. TCS gets 43% of its overall business and generates more than thrice as much in revenue as Wipro from the sector. Cognizant gets a similar proportion from BFSI and grew revenue from the sector by 20% in 2012.

“Wipro has been a slow bear in BFSI compared with other Indian counterparts such as TCS and Cognizant,” said Yugal Joshi, practice director at outsourcing advisory firm Everest Group. “When the financial downturn happened in 2008-09, Wipro was one of the companies that was least impacted because it has the least exposure towards BFSI. But once the market started to recover a bit, the technology spending went up in BFSI and Wipro was found wanting there because of their lack of exposure.”

In April, Wipro gave a tepid revenue growth forecast for the first quarter, raising concerns about whether the turnaround plan overseen by CEO Kurien was working.

After the fourth quarter results were announced in April, Kurien admitted that Wipro had started slowly in BFSI and needed to step up its performance in the sector.

“If you look at banking, we’ve traditionally had a very poor footprint, being late to start off in the game, and I think some of the fact that our footprint and some of the customers that are doing well or not has been reflected in our topline growth. And we were overweight again on investment banking, which has been under pressure,” Kurien had said.

Kurien said Wipro would focus on “deepening our footprint in BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), not using traditional, but non-traditional methods.”

For the 2012-13 financial year, revenue from Wipro’s financial services business grew sluggishly at 3.7% to 1.65 billion, lagging the company’s overall revenue growth of 5%. Wipro expects the appointment of Balasubramanian will help it compete better with rivals such as TCS and Cognizant.

Experts tracking the sector feel Wipro will find it difficult to make significant headway in BFSI, given the competitive landscape and their relatively less established footprint in the sector.

“Now the challenge is that there is very limited business in the market — most of the business is coming from renewals and the service providers are going all out to maintain their existing clients,” said Joshi of Everest Group. “Now if Wipro wants to win business from any fresh, new BFSI client, it will be very tough for them…the marketplace is becoming hyper-competitive and no other service provider will gave away even an inch. There is a lot of pressure on pricing. So the challenges for Wipro are going to increase going forward.”

___ (c)2013 the Mint (New Delhi) Visit the Mint (New Delhi) at www.livemint.com
Distributed by MCT Information Services

source: http://www.menafn.com / June 13th, 2013

Bangalore : 

Germany’s relatively stable economy in the troubled Euro Zone has prompted Wipro to increase its headcount.

India’s fourth largest software exporter has decided to triple its headcount in the next three years.

According to a company statement, the company plans to add 1,000 employees in Germany by 2016, from 500 employees at present.

Wipro counts a global automotive company, a European utilities’ major and a large telecom company in Germany as some of its 30 clients in the region.

FOCUS ON SMALL FIRMS

To drive stronger incremental growth in the future, Wipro is looking to address the requirements of medium-size enterprises in Germany in addition to large global enterprises, said Rajat Mathur, Chief Sales and Operations Officer (Growth Markets), Wipro.

Similar to Wipro, other Indian IT companies are also looking to increase their European presence – either by acquiring companies or recruiting in Germany.

In September last year, Infosys made its largest ever acquisition by buying Swiss consulting firm Lodestone Holding AG for $350 million. At the time of the acquisition, CEO S.D Shibulal said the acquisition would help Infosys in getting access to 850 IT consulting employees and also give it a scale in SAP software implementing business. SAP makes software for companies to manage their accounting, supply chain and other inventory management functions.

Cognizant in December last year acquired six companies for an undisclosed amount in Germany. All these companies have development centres in Germany. ccording to sources inside HCL Tech, the company plans to increase headcount in the region. When contacted an HCL spokesperson said that the company does not comment on workforce in a particular geography and does not make any forward looking comments.

Apart from the large companies, even mid-size Indian IT companies are also increasing their Germany play.

In January, Pune-based Geometric bought 3Cap Technologies, a German firm specialising in automotive electronics engineering with 110 employees, for an undisclosed amount.

REVENUES FROM EUROPE

Despite slowdown, revenues from Europe for all the top 5 IT companies have crossed the billion-dollar mark.

“We are seeing an increased viability for offshoring,” said Shashi Bhusan, Senior Research Analyst, Prabhudas Lilladher. Industry estimates peg the Germany IT market at around $80 billion in 2012.

source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com / Business Line / Home> Industry> Info-Tech / by The Hindu Bureau – venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in / Bangalore – June 12th, 2013