HCLTech

Timeline

1. 1976Shiv Nadar and partners start HCL Enterprise, which begins by making calculators and later personal computers.HCL Infosystems, the hardware arm, is the other side of the same group.
2. 1991HCL Technologies is incorporated on 12 November as HCL Overseas Limited, providing software and technology development services.
3. 1993The company begins enterprise IT infrastructure management and wins the order to build India's first floorless electronic stock exchange for the National Stock Exchange.
4. 1994The company is renamed HCL Consulting Limited.
5. 1999It is renamed HCL Technologies Limited on 6 October, to reflect its activities more closely.
6. 2000HCLTech goes public on 11 January with an issue of 14.2 million shares.
7. 2001It forms a joint venture with Deutsche Bank by buying 51 per cent of Deutsche Software, later renamed DSL Software.
8. 2003It wins a contract to develop embedded software for the Airbus A340 flight warning system and sells its stake in HCL Perot Systems for over 105 million dollars.
9. 2004It buys the remaining 49 per cent of DSL Software, folding the banking technology business into the company.
10. 2005It expands in Northern Ireland, an investment announced by the then British prime minister Tony Blair in 2006.
11. 2008It acquires the British consultancy Axon Group for 440 million pounds, which lifts enterprise application services from 9 to 22 per cent of revenue within three years.
12. 2015It acquires Concept to Silicon Systems, an engineering services firm, in a period of steady small acquisitions.
13. 2016Anant Gupta leaves as chief executive and C Vijayakumar is appointed in his place; the company also buys Butler America Aerospace for 85 million dollars.
14. 2017HCL and IBM announce a partnership under which HCL takes over development of the Notes, Domino, Sametime and Verse collaboration tools.
15. 2018It buys the American data company Actian with Sumeru Equity Partners for 330 million dollars, and Datawave in Britain.
16. 2019It completes the purchase of a group of IBM software products, including AppScan, BigFix, Commerce, Connections, Notes, Domino and Unica, and starts HCLSoftware.
17. 2021Revenue crosses 10 billion dollars, and HCL America buys the remaining stake in Actian for 100.2 million dollars.
18. 2022The company unveils the HCLTech brand identity, and acquires the Hungarian data consultancy Starschema for 42.5 million dollars.
19. 2023It buys the German automotive engineering firm ASAP Group for 279 million dollars and signs a 2.1 billion dollar managed network services deal with Verizon Business.
20. 2024It agrees to buy the communications technology assets of Hewlett Packard Enterprise for 225 million dollars.
21. 2025HCLTech marks 25 years since its listing, having delivered a total return of more than 1,300 per cent to shareholders since the IPO.
22. 2026It picks up 10.5 per cent of the Indian artificial intelligence startup Sarvam AI for 150.7 million dollars and enters the data centre business, while revenue for the year ended March 2026 reaches about 1.41 lakh crore rupees.

What it does

HCLTech sells technology work to large organisations. The company runs other companies' applications, moves them to the cloud, takes over their IT infrastructure, builds and tests software, designs electronic and mechanical products for manufacturers, and sells a set of enterprise software products of its own. It was spun out of the HCL Group in 1991, is headquartered in Noida in Uttar Pradesh, and says it operates in about 60 countries with more than 200 delivery centres.^[1]

The business is organised in three segments. IT and business services is the largest and covers application management, infrastructure, cloud and business process work. Engineering and research and development services takes on product engineering, embedded software and industrial design for customers in aerospace, automotive, medical devices and telecoms. HCLSoftware is the product business, created in 2019 around the software assets the company bought from IBM and later added to with Actian.^[1]

Geography decides how the company earns. The United States accounted for 56.3 per cent of revenue and Europe 27.8 per cent as of March 2026, which means HCLTech's results move with American technology spending, the dollar, and immigration policy in a way that a domestic business would not. Its largest customers are in financial services, manufacturing, technology and telecoms, and healthcare and life sciences have become a growing segment of the engineering business.^[1]

What distinguishes HCLTech from its two larger Indian peers is the product business. Owning software products such as Notes or AppScan gives the company recurring licence and subscription revenue and a direct relationship with customers who never buy its services, which is a different business model from the hours and projects that make up most of the industry's revenue.^[1]

History

HCLTech exists because HCL Enterprise, a hardware company, decided in 1991 that the future of Indian technology was in software and services rather than in making personal computers. HCL Infosystems, formed in 1976 to make calculators and later one of India's leading PC makers, kept the hardware business and eventually lost market share to Hewlett Packard and Dell. The software business was incorporated separately on 12 November 1991 as HCL Overseas Limited.^[1]

The early years were spent establishing that an Indian company could run other companies' systems. In 1993 HCLTech won the order to build India's first floorless electronic stock exchange for the National Stock Exchange, the project that gave it credibility in infrastructure management, and by the end of the decade it had expanded its services to the United States, Europe and the Asia Pacific. The company was renamed HCL Consulting Limited in July 1994 and HCL Technologies Limited on 6 October 1999, and it listed on 11 January 2000 with an issue of 14.2 million shares.^[1][2]

Growth after the listing came from buying capability rather than building it. The 2001 joint venture with Deutsche Bank, in which HCLTech bought 51 per cent of Deutsche Software and later the remaining 49 per cent, gave it a banking technology division. Control Point in the United States, Volvo's IT business, Capital Stream, Datawave, and the German firm H and D International were all bought to add customers or a geography, and the pattern has continued for two decades.^[3][4][6]

The largest early deal was Axon Group, the British consultancy acquired in 2008 for 440 million pounds. HCLTech merged its enterprise application services division into Axon, and in the three years after the acquisition that division's share of company revenue rose from 9 per cent to 22 per cent, which is the clearest evidence in the company's history that a well chosen acquisition can change its mix rather than just its size.^[1]

The 2010s were about scale and about software. HCLTech bought Concept to Silicon Systems for engineering, Butler America Aerospace for its aviation engineering work, Urban Fulfillment Services for financial services processing, and Sankalp Semiconductor for chip design. In 2017 it took over development of IBM's Notes, Domino, Sametime and Verse tools, and in 2019 it bought a group of IBM products outright, which turned a services company into a product company as well.^[7][8]

Revenue crossed 10 billion dollars in the year to March 2021, the milestone that put the company in the same bracket as its larger Indian peers. The next five years added scale in Europe and in engineering: the ASAP Group in Germany, the communications technology assets of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and in 2026 a stake in the artificial intelligence startup Sarvam AI alongside a push into data centre services.^[10][11][13]

Founders and leadership

Shiv Nadar founded HCL in 1976 and built the hardware business that later became HCL Infosystems before spinning the software company out in 1991. He is chairman emeritus, having handed the chair to his daughter, Roshni Nadar Malhotra, and he remains the company's largest shareholder with about 60.77 per cent in 2026. His other interests include a large stake in the broader HCL Group, philanthropy through the Shiv Nadar Foundation and the Shiv Nadar University, and his surname remains the group's single most valuable asset.^[1]

Roshni Nadar Malhotra became chairperson of the board and has kept the company's technology and sustainability agenda at the centre of its public statements. Under her chairmanship the company renamed itself HCLTech in 2022 with the positioning phrase Supercharging Progress, describing itself as a technology company rather than a software services provider.^[1]

C Vijayakumar, usually known as Vijay, is chief executive and managing director. He took over in October 2016 when Anant Gupta left abruptly, and he has led the company through the product acquisitions, the growth past 10 billion dollars in revenue and the recent move into AI services and data centres. He is the fourth chief executive in the company's history.^[5][1]

The board and the leadership team, rather than a single founder, now run the business day to day: segment heads for services, engineering and software, a large delivery organisation in India, and country heads in the United States, Europe and the Asia Pacific. Investors watch the succession question at the top of the HCL Group, where the Nadar family holds control, as much as they watch quarterly margins.^[1]

The services business

IT and business services is the company's largest segment and the one most people mean when they describe Indian IT. HCLTech runs applications for banks, insurers and manufacturers, moves workloads to public clouds, manages networks and data centres, and takes over business processes such as claims handling and customer support. The work is sold as multi year contracts with a fixed price or a rate card, which makes revenue visible but exposed to clients cutting their technology budgets.^[1]

The infrastructure management practice is the oldest part of the business, dating to 1993 and the National Stock Exchange order. It has grown into a business that manages servers, networks and end user computing for large clients, and it is where the company has most often taken over an entire function rather than a project, including the managed network services contract with Verizon Business signed in August 2023 that was valued at 2.1 billion dollars.^[1][12]

Cloud and artificial intelligence are the current growth story. The company has been moving clients onto the major cloud platforms, building data platforms and, more recently, AI systems that sit on top of them, and in 2026 it entered the data centre business to offer what it calls full stack AI services, so that it can supply the computing as well as the software that runs on it.^[1]

The American market is the reason this segment exists in its present size. More than half of company revenue comes from the United States, which is where the largest contracts are signed and where the company's ability to move engineers and managers across borders matters most, both commercially and politically.^[1]

Engineering and research and development services

Engineering and research and development is the part of HCLTech that looks least like conventional outsourcing. The company designs and tests products for other manufacturers, writing embedded software for aircraft systems, automotive electronics, medical devices, semiconductors and telecoms equipment. The practice traces back to the Airbus A340 flight warning system contract won in 2003, and it has been built out through acquisitions such as Concept to Silicon Systems, Butler America Aerospace, Sankalp Semiconductor and the German automotive engineering firm ASAP Group.^[1][8][11]

The work is sold to companies that make physical products and increasingly to companies that make cars with software inside them. Automotive engineering has become the fastest moving part of the practice, because electric and connected vehicles require software defined systems, and the ASAP Group acquisition in 2023 was explicitly about autonomous driving technology.^[11]

Semiconductors are the newest strand. Sankalp Semiconductor brought chip design capability in 2019, and the wider HCL Group has invested separately in manufacturing through India Chip Private Limited, its joint venture with Foxconn, which opened a chip facility at Jewar in Uttar Pradesh in 2026. HCLTech itself stays on the design and software side.^[1][8]

Engineering services carry lower margins than application management in some contracts and better margins in others, because the work is harder to automate and harder to hand to a smaller rival. For HCLTech the practice matters strategically: it ties the company to long product lifecycles and gives it exposure to industrial customers that do not buy conventional IT outsourcing at all.^[1]

HCLSoftware and the IBM deal

HCLSoftware is the company's product division and its most unusual asset. It was created in 2019 after HCLTech completed the purchase of a group of IBM products: AppScan for security testing, BigFix for endpoint management, Commerce, Connections, Digital Experience, Notes and Domino, Sametime and Unica. The deal gave HCLTech products that hundreds of large organisations already ran, along with the maintenance and licence revenue that comes with them.^[7]

The division also owns the data and analytics business built from Actian, the American company HCLTech acquired with Sumeru Equity Partners in 2018 for 330 million dollars and took full ownership of in 2021. Products in that stable include HCL Informix, the Actian Data Platform, Actian Ingres, Actian Zen, Actian NoSQL and Zeenea. The product mix means HCLSoftware sells perpetual and subscription licences rather than projects.^[1]

The business has scale but not the growth of a modern software company. HCLSoftware reported annual recurring revenue of about 11,986 crore rupees, or about 1.2 billion dollars, in the 2025 to 2026 financial year, which makes it a useful contributor to revenue and margin without changing the overall shape of a services company.^[1]

The division has also been used as a route into new markets. In 2024 HCLSoftware partnered with India's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade for a manufacturing incubation programme and launched the HCL SYNC programme, which gave participating startups exposure abroad and was tied to the government's Make in India policy and to commercialising domestic intellectual property.^[1]

HCL Group, HCL Infosystems and the chip venture

HCLTech is the flagship of the HCL Group, the larger family controlled group that Shiv Nadar built from the hardware business he started in 1976. HCL Infosystems, formed to make calculators and later one of India's leading makers of personal computers and laptops, lost market share to foreign manufacturers and closed its manufacturing division, which is why the group's technology future now runs through the software company rather than the hardware one.^[1]

The group has extended into services that sit beside the technology business. HCL Healthcare was launched in February 2014 to provide corporate health services, and HCL TalentCare was created as a skilling and staffing venture to supply the group and its customers with trained workers. These businesses share the HCL name and the family's capital but are separate from the listed company.^[1]

The most ambitious group project is in semiconductors. India Chip Private Limited, the group's joint venture with Taiwan's Foxconn, launched a chip manufacturing facility at Jewar in Uttar Pradesh in 2026. It is the clearest sign that the family sees manufacturing as a complement to the design and engineering work that HCLTech already sells.^[1]

HCLTech also runs HCLFoundation, its corporate social responsibility arm in India, which had invested about 1,984 crore rupees in social and environmental programmes as of March 2026. Its programmes include the HCLTech Grant, Samuday, Uday, My Clean City and Harit, and it reports that its sports programme has reached more than 64,000 athletes, that 25 para athletes supported by it have represented India internationally, and that its artisan marketplace My E Haat has supported more than 5,000 craftspeople across ten states.^[1]

Revenue and financials

For the year ended 31 March 2026 HCLTech reported revenue of about 1,40,998 crore rupees, operating income of about 23,980 crore rupees and net income of about 18,799 crore rupees. Assets were about 1,17,587 crore rupees and equity about 76,058 crore rupees at that date. Those figures come from the audited results filed with the Indian exchanges, and they make HCLTech the third largest India-headquartered IT services company by revenue.^[1]

The milestone that mattered to the market was passing 10 billion dollars of revenue, reached provisionally in the quarter to December 2020 and reported in January 2021 with guidance of 2 to 3 per cent growth for that financial year. Crossing that line changed how the company was valued, because it put HCLTech in the group of Indian firms that global clients treat as an automatic candidate for very large contracts.^[10]

Growth has since come from a mix of new contracts, acquisitions and currency. The 2.1 billion dollar Verizon deal, the 225 million dollar purchase of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's communications technology assets and the 279 million dollar ASAP Group acquisition are all in the last few years, and the company has also been adding artificial intelligence work, including a 150.7 million dollar stake in Sarvam AI in June 2026 that valued the startup at about 1.5 billion dollars.^{[12][13][11][1]}

Profitability is watched through two numbers: the margin on earnings before interest and tax, which the company guides on every quarter, and the attrition rate, which decides how much it spends on hiring and training. Attrition was reported at about 12.5 per cent in the quarterly disclosure for the three months to March 2026, with headcount up modestly, which is a normal range for the industry but high enough to keep wage costs rising.^[1]

Because revenue is earned in dollars and euros and much of the cost is in rupees, the rupee's fall helps reported margins and its rise hurts them, and the company's hedging policy is a regular subject in its results calls. Client concentration is the other risk in the numbers: a small number of very large customers account for a large share of revenue, so any single client cutting spending shows up quickly in the growth rate.^[1]

Shareholding and ownership

Shiv Nadar holds about 60.77 per cent of HCLTech through the family's holding structure, which makes HCLTech a promoter controlled company in Indian regulatory terms. The founding family also controls the wider HCL Group, whose other interests include HCL Infosystems, the healthcare venture HCL Healthcare, the skilling business HCL TalentCare and the chip joint venture India Chip.^[1]

The rest of the equity is held by Indian and global institutions, index funds and retail investors. HCLTech is a constituent of the Sensex and the Nifty 50, which means index funds must hold it, and its shares trade on both the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange under the symbol HCLTECH with ISIN INE860A01027. That index membership is one reason its stock is more widely owned than its peers of similar size outside the indices.^[1]

The company returns cash to shareholders through dividends and occasional buybacks, a policy that suits a business generating steady free cash flow and needing little capital expenditure. A services company spends on people, offices and acquisitions rather than on plants, so the question shareholders ask is not how much the company will invest but how much of the profit it will hand back.^[1]

Governance at HCLTech has been less eventful than at several of its peers. The company has not faced fraud allegations of the kind that have hit other Indian groups, and its main governance questions have concerned the pace of the chief executive transition in 2016, the valuation of the software product acquisitions, and the fact that the promoter family also owns businesses that share the HCL name.^[1][5]

Employees and offices

HCLTech had about 230,000 employees worldwide as of 30 September 2026, drawn from 164 nationalities. It operates in around 60 countries with more than 200 delivery centres and more than 70 laboratories, and its headquarters campus is in Noida, in the special economic zone where the company began as a hardware business. The workforce is the company's largest cost and its main asset.^[1]

The company's delivery model spreads work between India and the markets where clients sit. India holds the largest share of engineers, while the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland and other European countries hold client facing teams and near shore delivery. Visas and local hiring rules therefore influence both cost and the ability to sell, and the company has built local delivery centres in the United States to reduce that dependence.^[1]

Hiring and attrition run the internal economy. The company has been recognised as a Global Top Employer and was named by Forbes as one of America's best employers for new graduates for the third consecutive year in 2026, recognition it uses in campus hiring, and it runs large training programmes to move new engineers onto billable projects quickly.^[1]

The product division and the engineering labs need a different kind of staff from the services business: security researchers, data engineers, chip designers and mechanical engineers, many of them outside India. That spread protects the company from relying on one labour market, and it makes wage inflation a question for each geography rather than for the company as a whole.^[1]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

• Deutsche Software: a joint venture formed in 2001 when HCLTech bought 51 per cent of Deutsche Bank's Indian software subsidiary, renamed DSL Software, with the remaining 49 per cent bought in 2004.^[1]
• Control Point: a United States acquisition that expanded the company's presence in the American market.^[3]
• Capital Stream: bought in February 2008 for about 40 million dollars, adding business process automation software for banks.^[6]
• Axon Group: the British consultancy acquired in 2008 for 440 million pounds, which lifted enterprise application services from 9 to 22 per cent of revenue within three years.^[1]
• Concept to Silicon Systems: an engineering services acquisition that deepened the research and development practice.^[1]
• Volvo's IT business: the Swedish carmaker's information technology arm, bought to add European clients and delivery capability.^[4]
• Butler America Aerospace: acquired for 85 million dollars, adding aviation engineering work.^[1]
• Urban Fulfillment Services: bought for about 30 million dollars, adding mortgage and financial services processing.^[1]
• Actian: acquired with Sumeru Equity Partners in 2018 for 330 million dollars, with the remaining stake bought in 2021 for 100.2 million dollars to create the data and analytics division of HCLSoftware.^[1]
• Datawave: a British data management platform, bought to add data engineering capability in Europe.^[16]
• H and D International Group: a German IT firm acquired for a foothold in the German market.^[15]
• IBM software products: the 2019 purchase of AppScan, BigFix, Commerce, Connections, Digital Experience, Notes and Domino, Sametime and Unica, which created HCLSoftware.^[7]
• Sankalp Semiconductor: bought for about 180 crore rupees, adding chip design services to the engineering practice.^[8]
• Starschema: the Hungarian data consultancy acquired in 2022 for 42.5 million dollars.^[9]
• ASAP Group: the German automotive engineering firm bought in 2023 for 279 million dollars.^[11]
• Verizon Business: a managed network services contract worth 2.1 billion dollars signed in August 2023, the largest single deal in the company's history.^[12]
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise communications assets: agreed in May 2024 for 225 million dollars.^[13]
• Sarvam AI: a 10.5 per cent stake for 150.7 million dollars in June 2026, valuing the Indian artificial intelligence startup at about 1.5 billion dollars.^[1]

Competition

HCLTech competes with Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, the two larger India-headquartered IT services companies, and with Wipro and Tech Mahindra at home. Abroad it competes with Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini and IBM Consulting, and in specific verticals with specialists: in engineering services with Capgemini Engineering and Tata Elxsi, in product software with vendors such as Atlassian and ServiceNow, and in chip design with the in-house teams of the companies it also serves.^[1]

The industry's competitive logic is turning toward artificial intelligence. Clients that once bought headcount to maintain systems are being offered automation and AI systems that do the same work with fewer people, and every large vendor is arguing that it can deliver that change. HCLTech's answer is a combination of new AI service lines, the data centre business it entered in 2026 and the stake in Sarvam AI, which gives it a position in Indian language models.^[1]

Relative to its two larger peers, HCLTech has a lower margin profile on some contracts and a more diversified mix because of the software and engineering businesses. That mix has protected growth when traditional outsourcing slows, and it also means the company is judged against software vendors on the product side and against services firms on the rest, which makes its valuation conversations harder than either.^[1][12]

Global capability centres are the newer competitor. Large multinationals that once outsourced IT to Indian vendors now run their own technology centres in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Noida, taking back work that used to be billed by the services industry. That is why the Indian majors are shifting toward transformation work, higher value engineering and products rather than competing on the price of maintenance.^[1]

Awards and recognition

The company collects third party recognition deliberately, and the list is long. In 2025 HCLTech was named the highest ranked India-headquartered technology company, for the second consecutive year, in TIME magazine's World's Best Companies list, and it was included again in TIME's World's Most Sustainable Companies list in 2026, placing it among the top five global professional services companies. In 2026 Fortune named it to the World's Most Admired Companies list in the IT services category.^[1]

Sustainability reporting has become part of the marketing. The company publishes emissions and energy data and links its renewable targets to its own offices and data centres, which matters both to investors using environmental screens and to clients who now ask suppliers for their carbon numbers before signing. Its inclusion in sustainability rankings is used as evidence that the claims are third party verified.^[1]

Industry analysts also rank the company by service line through their quadrants and wave reports, which influence which vendors clients invite to bid. HCLTech's engineering and research and development practice and its digital workplace services are the areas where it most often appears at the top of those assessments, and the company cites them in its investor presentations.^[1]

Employment awards carry weight in a business that hires tens of thousands of engineers a year. Being named a Global Top Employer and appearing on Forbes lists for early career employees is used in campus recruitment, where a services company competes for the same graduates as a product company that offers a fraction of the headcount and more visible work.^[1]

Sports partnerships

HCLTech uses sport as its main global marketing channel, and the arrangement is unusual in that it sells technology rather than putting its logo on a shirt. Since 2019 the company has been the official digital technology partner of Cricket Australia, working on the governing body's digital platforms and fan experiences, which puts its engineers inside a sport that dominates Indian attention.^[1]

In the United States, HCLTech is the digital transformation partner of MetLife Stadium, home of the New York Giants and the New York Jets, and in 2026 the relationship was expanded to include artificial intelligence work. In the same year it became the official digital experience partner of the DP World Tour, leading a multi year overhaul of the golf tour's digital ecosystem and fan facing platforms.^[1]

The pattern behind these deals is the same as the company's product strategy: rather than advertising, HCLTech takes on a visible technology project for a sports property, which becomes a reference customer it can point to when it sells the same work to clubs, leagues and broadcasters. It also gives the company a presence in markets where its brand is otherwise unknown.^[1]

Sport sponsorship of this kind is a small share of group spending and an outsized share of its public profile. For a company whose customers are chief information officers rather than consumers, a partnership that produces working software for a stadium or a cricket board is a better argument than a billboard.^[1]

Risks, criticism and controversies

The most cited risk in HCLTech's own disclosures is customer and geographic concentration. The United States produced 56.3 per cent of revenue and Europe 27.8 per cent as of March 2026, and a limited number of large clients account for a substantial share of billings, so a single client's decision to insource or move work to a smaller rival shows up in the growth number. Analysts ask about the top ten clients on every results call.^[1]

Immigration is the second. Indian services companies serve American clients partly by sending engineers on work visas and partly by hiring locally, and changes to visa rules, fees and processing times raise the cost of the first route. HCLTech has responded by building local delivery centres and hiring in the United States, which reduces legal risk and increases wage cost.^[1]

Attrition and wages are the third. The company reported attrition at about 12.5 per cent in the quarter ended March 2026, and in an industry where the product is people, losing an eighth of the workforce a year means constant hiring, training and lost billable time. Wage inflation in India, where most delivery staff sit, feeds directly into the cost line.^[1]

The company has faced criticism over specific decisions rather than systemic allegations. The departure of chief executive Anant Gupta in October 2016 was abrupt and prompted questions about the board's process, the value of the IBM product acquisitions was questioned by analysts who noted the declining growth of those products, and the HCL name is shared between the listed company, the group's other businesses and the family's holding vehicles, which makes the boundaries of the listed entity a fair question for minority shareholders. Unlike several large Indian corporate groups, HCLTech has not been the subject of fraud allegations at the centre of the company.^[5][7][1]

Reading the numbers

The first number to look at in an HCLTech result is revenue growth in constant currency, not in rupees. Because most revenue is earned in dollars and euros, a falling rupee flatters reported growth without any extra work being sold, and the company itself reports both figures so that the difference is visible. Rupee revenue of about 1,40,998 crore in the year ended March 2026 is only meaningful next to the currency assumption behind it.^[1]

The second is the margin on earnings before interest and tax, which the company guides on every quarter and which is the outcome of pricing, the mix of service lines, wage costs, utilisation of staff and currency. A services company cannot raise prices quickly, so margin is mostly a measure of how well it manages people and subcontracted work rather than of pricing power.^[1]

The third is the order book and the deal wins the company announces. Large contracts such as the Verizon Business managed network deal, worth 2.1 billion dollars over its term, are reported in total contract value, which is not the same as revenue in a year, and the difference between the two is where most misreadings of a services company's performance happen.^[12]

Finally, free cash flow and cash conversion decide what shareholders get. HCLTech converts most of its profit into cash, spends little on capital assets, and uses the surplus for dividends, buybacks and small acquisitions such as Starschema, ASAP Group and the Sarvam AI stake. For a company of its size, the discipline is less about building anything new than about not overpaying for growth.^[9][11][1]

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