Infosys to invest more in digital technologies to drive growth, look for strategic inorganic acquisitions

Mumbai: Global software major Infosys will invest more in digital technologies to drive business and look for strategic inorganic acquisitions, a company official said on Monday. “As digital is not just about technologies but driving business outcomes, we will invest more in it as we are well positioned in it (digital),” Infosys Chief Executive Salil Parekh told analysts at a meeting here. Presenting the company’s strategic direction, Parekh said there was tremendous loyalty and expectation from the clients on digital future. “As lot of core areas needed digitsation, we are working on them,” he noted. Admitting that the company had built its strategy on what the clients were telling its executives, Parekh said there was a huge growth in digital, which was a disruption in the IT industry through technology. “We are not only digitising core areas, but also combining all our services to drive business outcomes for our clients instead of merely selling technologies or services,” said Parekh. The Bengaluru-based company plans to scale its digital business, which contributed $2.8 billion in fiscal 2017-18, energise its clients’ core technology landscape via artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, re-skill its techies and expand its localisation in Australia, Europe and the US. “Navigating Your Next’ is our aspiration of how we will partner with each one of our clients”, Parekh said in a statement on April 13 after declaring the company’s financial results for the last fiscal (FY 2018). Digital offerings contributed 25.5 percent ($2.79 billion) to the company’s annual revenue of $10,939 million in fiscal 2017-18. The company added 73 clients during the quarter, taking the total to 1,204 for the year from 1,191 quarter ago and 1,162 year ago. [caption id=“attachment_4363865” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Salil Parekh, CEO and MD, Infosys. Image courtesy - company.[/caption] Parekh also spoke on the four pillars of the company’s new business strategy – scaling up of its agile businesses, which brings more relevance to the future of its clients; energising core of AI; re-skilling employees to move into data and cloud and a localisation into its markets such as the US, Europe, Australia. “We are ready with a digital framework for clients and have built a pentagon of 5 dimensions for digital business,” said Parekh. According to the company’s estimates, market opportunities in digital are at about $160 billion and growing at 15 percent or more. “We are going to first scale our agile digital, helping our clients go on their digital journey, which is a large market,” he added. The company has drawn a three-year road-map to achieve its digital goals – to stabilise the company in the first year, start the momentum in the second year and accelerate where it can have more share of clients’ relevance in the third year. Infosys has projected a robust revenue growth of 9 percent in dollar terms for the fiscal 2018-19 despite its net profit declining 28 per cent sequentially in the fourth quarter of the fiscal 2017-18. “Consolidated revenues are expected to grow 7-9 percent in dollar terms and 8.2-10.2 percent in rupee terms for fiscal 2018-19,” the company said on April 13 while announcing its financial results for FY2018.