HCL Tech quarterly profit up 32 percent, shares fall over 9 percent

MUMBAI (Reuters) - HCL Technologies Ltd, India's fourth-largest software services exporter, posted a 32 percent rise in quarterly net profit, beating estimates, as sales in the Americas, the company's biggest market, rose.

Shares in HCL Technologies, however, closed 9.1 percent lower on Friday, as the technology outsourcing company's revenue growth of 12.8 percent in dollar terms was below street expectations, stock market dealers said.

For most IT services companies, analysts and investors track the dollar sales numbers as clients oversees get billed in that currency.

HCL earned 18.73 billion rupees ($303.44 million) in profit in the September quarter, compared to 14.16 billion rupees last year. Analysts, on average, were expecting the profit to be at 17.29 billion rupees, as per Thomson Reuters data.

 

HCL relies heavily on contracts to manage data centres and networks for revenue growth, whereas peers Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Infosys Ltd earn a greater proportion of revenue from higher-margin software services.

($1 = 61.7250 rupees)

(Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee; Editing by Sunil Nair)