TCS Q3: revenue crosses $7 bln, staff strength dips for first time since Covid outbreak; Google invests in Cropin

Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT services company, said its quarterly revenue has crossed the $7 billion mark, with sales for its fiscal third quarter, the October-December period, coming in at $7.075 billion. A near-term slowdown in demand is apparent in the staff addition numbers. TCS saw a net reduction in its workforce, for the first time since the Covid pandemic began to fan out across the world. For the rest of the current fiscal year, TCS doesn’t expect to add many more people. Infosys, HCL Tech and Wipro will report their Q3 earnings this week. Notes: Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT services company, said its quarterly revenue has crossed the $7 billion mark, with sales for its fiscal third quarter, the October-December period, coming in at $7.075 billion. That represents a 13.5 percent increase from the year-earlier period in constant-currency terms, which eliminates exchange-rate variations, according to a press release. The company saw “strong growth in a seasonally weak quarter, driven by cloud services, market share gains through vendor consolidation, and continued momentum in North America and the UK,” CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said in the press release. “Looking ahead, and beyond current uncertainties, our longer-term growth outlook remains robust,” he added. TCS doesn’t provide a formal projection, but its staff additions and churn are among the numbers that are keenly watched, as proxies for both near-term demand and the state of the industry. TCS saw a net reduction of close to 2,200 employees in its staff strength at the end of the December quarter, bringing the total to about 614,000. The last time TCS saw a reduction in its workforce was around the time the world was beginning to be swept by the Covid pandemic. The company saw its staff numbers reduce by about 4,800 employees during the April-June period of the year 2020. And while attrition, or staff churn, remains high at more than 21 percent on a leading-12-months basis, compared with about 15 percent a year earlier, the trend has stabilised and is on a downward trajectory Milind Lakkad, TCS’s chief human resources officer told reporters in a conference yesterday in Mumbai. Overall, a slowdown is apparent, amid fears of a recession in the world’s richest economies. TCS added about 21,800 employees in the first three quarters of the current fiscal year. In comparison, the company added more than 103,500 staff in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2022, as demand soared for IT following the Covid pandemic. For the rest of the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2023, Lakkad does not expect to add much more staff. Cropin, an agritech venture in Bengaluru that offers an industry cloud for agriculture, has raised Rs. 113 crore ($14 million) as part of its Series-C funding from new investors Google and JSR Corporation. This brings its total funding to $65.4 million, according to private markets intelligence provider Tracxn. Virohan, a healthcare edtech startup near Delhi, has raised $7 million in funding led by Blume Ventures with participation from Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund, Rebright Partners, Lesing Artha Limited and others. This brings its total funding to $11 million. Virohan, through its online and offline courses, trains students in allied healthcare programs for technicians in the healthcare industry, the company said in a press release.