The prospects of Indian IT companies bagging large deals appear to be fading, at least till the storm in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector settles down. Over the last six quarters, the number of $100-million deals has either remained stagnant or even declined. Moreover, with investment research firms like Goldman Sachs predicting a 5 per cent contraction in IT spending in 2009, the task of getting large deals will only get tougher.
Consider the case of the country's leading IT company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The IT major did not add a single client in the $100-million segment in the quarter ended September 2008, while it added just one client in the $50-million bracket. For Infosys too, the country's second largest IT services provider, the number of $100-million deals went down from six to five during the same quarter on a sequential basis. HCL Technologies also did not add any client in the quarter under review.
Analysts attributed the crisis in the global financial market for the slowdown in big-ticket IT deals. The crisis has hit the BFSI segment, which contributes about 40 per cent of the IT firms' revenues.
"Clearly, the $100-million deals would be hard to come by as these are the kind of deals that would be impacted first. The good news is that we have not heard of any major client pulling out from these vendors. But deals in the range of $25 million and slightly higher would continue to come, and hence the focus," said Vinu B Kartha, principal, Tholons.
Analysts believe this is inevitable, as in the long run, the size of deals is not expected to increase as clients coming to the market will look for multiple vendors. "Companies are cautious of the economic environment and they wish to retain their clients -- be they big or small, but they are derisking their business by adding clients that are dispersed across sectors," said Rajesh Jain, head of ICE, KPMG.
Mining smaller clients requires great attention and management focus. But the top-tier firms' managements tend to focus on clients that can return higher revenues. So, the focus is almost always on large, global, firms, said analysts.
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However, to counter these dwindling numbers, top IT firms have started focusing on smaller clients in the range of $1-50 million. For instance, this quarter, TCS was successful in getting 32 of its clients in the $1-50 million segment to sign up for deals of higher value. "If you even look at revenue contribution from new clients in this quarter, it is very small. Still, 90 per cent or so is contributed by the existing client base. Services firms should focus on client portfolio optimisation and make this a bigger part of their revenue," said Sabyasachi Satpathy, senior director, neoIT.
Hyderabad-based Satyam Computer Services is looking to mine its existing customer base. Ram Maynapati, president, Satyam Computer Services, had told Business Standard that it was in talks with existing clients in the range of $30-50 million for transformational deals.
For Infosys, while the number of clients in the $1-million category remained the same at 325, it added five clients in the $5-million category and three in the $10-million segment. "We had won five large deals in the second quarter of this financial year. With that, we are focused on making our existing customer relationship larger, while also focusing on larger deals," said Balakrishnan V, CFO, Infosys Technologies. Experts are of the opinion that IT firms will have to change their strategy to focus on clients with a smaller size of deals. Srinivas Vadlamani, CFO, Satyam Computer Services, said, "The numbers and value of deals are in line with the sign of times without a dramatic difference in any of these aspects. In addition to such large deals, there are also a number of smaller-value deals and, while we do not reveal the numbers, there has been no change in that pipeline on a q-o-q basis, though sectoral or geographical distribution might have seen some changes."