Genpact, India’s largest business process outsourcing (BPO) company, has confirmed its revenue growth expectation of 6-9 per cent over 2008. Chief Operating Officer (COO) V N Tyagarajan told Kirtika Suneja what this means for the company and its growth path. Edited excerpts:
Your quarterly revenue is up 5 per cent but net income is down 1.6 per cent.
One of our delivery centres in India came out of the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) scheme, because of which tax rates increased. Second, we earned lower interest income than the last financial year. Also, we had a foreign exchange loss of $2.57 million (Rs 12 crore) since the pound, euro and Australian dollar weakened against the US dollar.
Genpact has around $400 million (around Rs 1,850 crore) in cash. Will it be used to acquire companies?
We have a business development team that looks at opportunities all the time. We see opportunities in captives, geographies and verticals, and continue to evaluate these, depending on their growth. Many companies set up captives in South America, India, China and Europe and do not want to continue to run them. Some of them are interesting, like those in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector, receivables management, niche areas like analytics or industry verticals like healthcare. Also, the current economic situation makes companies focus on core competencies. However, acquisitions will be driven by capabilities at the right value and size may not be the first criterion.
What encouraging signs are you getting from the market?
Though clients still have some degree of uncertainty, client demand is beginning to come back. There is a strong and diverse pipeline of prospective clients with diverse type of work, sizes and geographies. India and Europe are showing great traction. Our win rate was at a historical high this quarter. But most important is the fact that there is faster decision making which was slow in the past few months. Our India-to-India business is a new one, where we added new clients.
Any plans for Europe?
We doubled our team in Europe and invested in the UK, Switzerland and France, as we were under-represented there. More clients there are thinking about business process management and hence, delivery centre footprint is strong in Europe.