I went deep into the Indian IT sector. Here's what's working, what isn't and the AI impact

I went deep into the Indian IT sector. Here's what's working, what isn't and the AI impact There's a lot of uncertainty around the IT sector right now and around what AI actually does to the work these companies sell. So let's analyse what their numbers are suggesting and clear up some of the confusion Start with jobs since that's the worry. TCS, Infosys, HCLTech and Tech Mahindra together employed about 12.9 lakh people at the end of June. A year ago it was about 13.1 lakh. So headcount is down roughly 1.2% in 12 months and all 4 grew their revenue over that period So the big layoffs aren't happening lately. But AI is affecting these companies somewhere else and it took me a while to find where. # Growth Constant currency (CC) growth removes currency swings and leaves only the actual work done. TCS grew 13.9% in Rs this quarter but just 3.2% in CC and that's the real thing https://preview.redd.it/gtwihdmwafph1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=b5f9f08faaee37c8a7ab732b45b489c4a4ab106f Tech Mahindra, the smallest of the 4 grew at roughly double the rate of TCS Same thing happens with profit. A dollar gets you about 11% more rupees than it did a year ago, so the rupee alone is adding roughly 11-12% to profit growth. https://preview.redd.it/bm8hqcmwafph1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=e190433e9c291cf88b77a44c7fa26f978e22ff5d But in dollar terms TCS's profit actually fell Now, growth can also be bought. Organic growth strips out the companies a firm has acquired so you see what the existing business managed on its own Out of Tech Mahindra's 6.6%, 6.2% was organic so nearly all of it is real. But Infosys grew 1% for the quarter and their CFO said acquisitions gave them about 1.1% of that. So the business they already had actually got smaller Their guidance says the same thing. Infosys cut it this quarter and on paper it might seem small but the actual issue is what's left inside https://preview.redd.it/0z1gifmwafph1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=828de02d3b0d8569639791ea1f9e9898da971aec Just half % of that growth is coming from the business they already run. This was also highlighted by an analyst on concall and CFO agreed with it So what made them cut it? Their order book is a good place to look # Deal wins TCV is the order book. Its the full value of a deal across its whole life so a 5 yrs deal worth 100 cr a yr shows up as 500 cr of TCV on day 1 https://preview.redd.it/52s3edmwafph1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0cab862fb7bd9486c217c3f55d0a8d95ca8a193 Its also the easiest number here to misread. TCS counts everything including renewals of work they already had, while HCLTech counts only business that's genuinely new. So these bars can't be ranked against each other. What you can compare is the trend. Tech Mahindra actually had 3 consecutive quarters above $1bn and its deal wins over the last 12 months are up 37.5%. TCS has signed 6 mega deals in 5 quarters while HCLTech just had its best ever first quarter for new bookings.  A better check on whether relationships are actually growing is the number of clients paying more than $50mn a year. Over the last 12 months TCS added 8 of them, Tech Mahindra 7 and HCLTech 6. Infosys added none and their count above $100mn hasn't moved in a year https://preview.redd.it/8br8h6owafph1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=2e0fe4a61a46b6410c5c590a25167b60ddb1007b Which is the real thing. Infosys signed $3.6bn of large deals, 61% of it are new and still couldn't hold their outlook. Some of that could just be timing. Big deals take time to reflect, HCLTech's CEO said their mega deal signed in July won't fully show till April 2027. But Infosys' CFO also said prices increased less than they expected and that's where the pressure seems to be coming from  # The pricing squeeze At renewal, clients have always asked for a discount. What's changed is the size of the ask because they now believe AI makes the work much cheaper to deliver How much that affects depends on the type of contract: •         Time and material means you get paid by the hour. So if AI makes your team 30% faster you end up billing 30% fewer hours. •         Fixed price means you're paid a set amount for the whole job. If you finish faster that saving stays with you until the contract renews and the client asks for it Each company is looking at a different part of its own book, which is why the same question gets 4 different answers: * TCS says the productivity it passes on is 10% to 15% and clients usually hand back extra work so revenue barely moves. * Infosys called it "AI led deflation" and said it hits small contracts too not just the big renewals. * HCLTech said their June quarter always carries planned revenue declines because productivity commitments are already written into their contracts. * Tech Mahindra said rivals are bidding 70% to 80% productivity into 5 yr deals and they're walking away HCLTech's is the one to understand. Fixed price doesn't mean much if you've already given away the savings # Not all of it is AI * The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) business is growing across all 4 companies. TCS said it grew in every region, Infosys expects it to grow faster than the company average, HCLTech grew 5.3% and Tech Mahindra 8.1%. * The weak spots are mostly in the industries their clients operate in. TCS mentioned auto (tariffs), North American airlines and non-essential retail. Infosys mentioned retail and European auto. HCLTech's telecom business fell 10.9% after 2 big US telcos cut spending while it said US healthcare is also under pressure. These businesses can recover when their clients start spending again. TCS for example, expects manufacturing to turn around this quarter AI pricing is different. If clients can get the same work done for less its hard for IT companies to get those prices back up # How they're fighting back To be fair to management nobody is just sitting there taking the discount. They've a strategy to tackle this Protecting what they have: •         **Take over rivals' work.** Clients want fewer vendors so these firms are bidding for entire IT estates. Infosys said 20% of their large deal TCV this quarter came from consolidation wins. Their CFO also said those deals came at healthy margins and they'd walk away if they didn't. That's worth keeping in mind with how competitive the market has become •         **Get off hourly billing.** If you bill by the hour then faster work means less earned. So they're pushing clients towards fixed fee and outcome-based contracts where the productivity gain stays with them. TCS said this is picking up especially in their agentic BPS work •         **Sell the cleanup.** Nobody can run enterprise AI on messy legacy data. HCLTech's CEO said a lot of their data and analytics traction is "preparatory work towards building enterprise AI stack." So lost maintenance revenue is coming back as data and migration work. TCS's $800mn SKF deal is a good example. It's an S/4HANA overhaul being redone with AI, and it's completely new business for TCS. •         **Fix the pyramid instead of firing.** They’re hiring juniors with AI tools at less salary and fewer expensive mid-level people. TCS onboarded 14,000 freshers last quarter and Infosys plans 20,000 college grads this year. They're also building small specialist AI teams. Infosys wants 6,000 "frontier engineers" and TCS wants at least 1% of its staff in similar roles, which is about the same number Building something new: * **Independent AI:**  All 4 are betting on this. HCLTech's CEO put it simply: clients "don't want the value disappearing into someone else's models". HCLTech put $150mn into Sarvam which is an Indian AI company. TCS became Mistral's first IT services partner and launched an independent cloud for Europe. Infosys and Tech Mahindra are working on similar products too  * **Owning the hardware:**. HCLTech is putting 3,500 cr into AI datacentres. Its CEO's view is that "the biggest opportunity is not to rent AI but to own the full stack." TCS also has its own datacentre business, HyperVault which actually helped win 2 large new deals this quarter If companies want to build their own AI, they still need firms like TCS and Infosys to build and run it. But if they can just use OpenAI or Anthropic directly there is less work for the IT companies. The bigger issue is that OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Microsoft are also building teams to help clients with this work. An analyst asked Infosys about this and Salil's said  that a few 1000 people at these companies can't match Infosys' 300,000 employees At the same time TCS just took 50,000 Anthropic licences and Infosys has 80,000 people using Claude Code or Codex. So these IT companies are both **working with AI companies and competing with them** # Operating margin Operating margin is what's left of every rs100 billed after delivery costs. It's probably the best way to see if a company actually has pricing power. The problem is that it can swing a lot in any given quarter depending on when the annual hikes come since salaries are 55% to 60% of revenue here. TCS came in at 24%, down 130 bps but 170 bps of that was the wage hike alone. So if you don’t consider the hike they were slightly ahead, though the rupee helped a bit there too. The other 3 went up: * **Infosys:** Margin went up 20 bps to 21.1% but the rupee added 70 bps. Without that it would’ve fallen around 50 bps * **HCLTech**: Margin increased 39 bps to 16.9% but again 60 bps came from currency and 70 bps from lower restructuring costs. Without that restructuring benefit it actually fell from 17.7% to 17.5%. * **Tech Mahindra:** Margin went up 60 bps to 14.4% mainly from higher volumes and cost savings. This is the one where the margin gain came from the business Which means TCS looks worse than it is and the other 3 look better. Infosys pays its hike in October and January, Tech Mahindra starts in Q2. So this means that cost is coming, just later. New big deals also cost more at the start. Tech Mahindra's CEO said they begin with more people onsite which is expensive and move work offshore over time TCS is also spending more. One analyst actually  pointed out its SG&A is up about 16% in dollars over the year and the CFO said they'd rather invest in AI, partners and talent than just focusing on margin # Are they doing more with fewer people? These companies have always grown by adding people. So if AI is genuinely doing that work now, revenue should go up while headcount stays flat or falls. https://preview.redd.it/66fm3imwafph1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=92543632b058ad9df0ec3da9da15f07851bd32be Both TCS and Tech Mahindra show a real gap here with revenue up while headcount fell. Tech Mahindra's is the wider of the 2 and it's not quite what it looks like. This fall is entirely in their IT segment which fell 6.6%, while their BPS segment grew. Their CEO said this was mainly from getting more productivity out of fixed price projects and also said hiring should start picking up again this year. TCS is the interesting one here. That -3.1% is mostly because of the cuts earlier this yr. Headcount fell from 6.13 lakh last June to 5.82 lakh in December, but it's been going back up since then. They added 9,279 people this quarter alone. So the company which cut the most is hiring again  Look at the size of those gaps though. Each one is basically how much more revenue a person brought in over the year and its still in single digits across all 4 TCS says AI can make work 10-15% more productive where it's used. If companies were keeping all of that benefit, you'd expect the gaps to be bigger. I feel a lot of it is probably going back to clients through lower prices. Also headcount doesn't count contractors. Spending on them went up at all 3 that report it. At TCS, outside consultants went from 4.7% to 5.9% of revenue. Tech Mahindra's subcontracting went from 9.8% to 11.4% and HCLTech's from 13.6% to 14.8%. So some of the extra work may just have shifted from employees to contractors. Attrition is the other thing I'd look at. Too high and you're spending more to replace people and may need subcontractors to fill the gaps. Too low could just mean nobody's hiring much. Rn its 11.8% at Tech Mahindra, 12.7% at HCLTech, 13.0% at Infosys and 13.6% at TCS. Nothing really stands out here. I wouldn't rank them on it though since they all calculate it a bit differently. Revenue per employee gives a better idea. I calculated annualised revenue divided by headcount, which comes to roughly $51k for TCS, $62k for Infosys, $65k for HCLTech and $45k for Tech Mahindra. That's my calculation while HCLTech reports $65.5k using a slightly different method The spread isn't all AI since TCS and Tech Mahindra both run big BPS businesses that need people by design. But HCLTech has pushed this up every quarter for 5 quarters now so they really are getting more out of each person. # AI revenue So if AI is replacing some of the old work, how much new work is it actually creating? https://preview.redd.it/up3jz5owafph1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=d10b71f77ffaf80805e96cc3849a91cd60706ffe Careful with these, because each company decides for itself what counts. Infosys leaves out work where AI is just bolted onto an existing project so their number is more conservative than it looks TCS is much the biggest in absolute money at $2.6bn annualised. But their CEO gave a warning that's easy to miss: this is mostly short projects, not the long maintenance contracts these companies live on. Once one ends they have to go win a fresh one. An analyst pointed out TCS added $75mn of AI revenue this quarter against $125mn the quarter before So its growing fast on a small base, while the bigger base below it keeps getting discounted # Cash and what you're paying Profit is an accounting number, but cash conversion tells you how much of that profit actually turned into cash. Infosys converted 116.5%, Tech Mahindra 108%, HCLTech 99% and TCS 93%. TCS uses operating cash flow while the others use free cash flow, so it's not exactly like for like, but all 4 look fine here. Doesn't look like anyone is reporting profits they can't turn into cash. RoE is basically how much profit the company makes for every Rs100 of shareholder money. It matters more for IT since it doesn't need much in factories or machinery so its expected to have decent numbers. TCS is at 51.8%, Infosys 31.9%, HCLTech 23.8% and Tech Mahindra 17.5%. HCLTech is worth a closer look though. They pay out 93.2% of profit as dividend and now there's the 3,500 cr datacentre plan on top. On the call, Kotak pointed out that doing 50MW properly costs closer to 30,000 cr and the CEO agreed the maths was broadly right. That's more than HCLTech's overall net cash of about 26,900 cr. And that had already fallen from about 33,300 cr last quarter after the dividend and the Sarvam stake. Worth following because HCLTech earns that 23.8% mostly by not owning much. Datacentres are the opposite of that. **Now price** https://preview.redd.it/l5pdmhmwafph1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=a79f9db58ba4384288ce6cd185177750ef242307 TCS and Infosys are not trading near what they normally do. Over 5 yrs TCS is down 41% and Infosys 37% while HCLTech is up 5.5% and Tech Mahindra 6.1%. So this isn't a sector selloff its market changing its mind about the 2 biggest names specifically And the RoE makes it even more interesting. TCS is the most profitable of the 4 based on the numbers above, yet it's trading at around half the valuation it normally gets. TCS also used to trade about 16% above Infosys on P/E. Now its about 6% so the market is paying a lot less extra for TCS than it used to.  Tech Mahindra is still near its normal P/E though even with the lowest RoE of the 4. But know that these P/Es are also based on rupee profits so if the rupee strengthens all 4 will seem to be more expensive  # Putting it together The job losses everyone is talking about isnt the biggest issue. What is there is pressure on price. Clients have understood that AI makes the work cheaper to deliver and they want that discount given to them All 4 admit its happening. The real question is whether the new AI work grows fast enough to cover what the discounting takes away. Right now AI is about 8% of revenue at best and the pressure is on everything else. TCS and Infosys are priced as though the answer is no. 6 things I'll watch: •         The rupee since a stronger rupee would cut reported profits at all 4 •         Infosys' organic growth since their own guidance barely assumes any. They're also changing CEO, Ashiss Dash takes over from Salil Parekh in April 2027 •         Whether TCS recovers the margin it lost to this quarter's wage hike. Their CFO wants to exit above 25% •         Whether HCLTech's datacentre spend stays at 3,500 cr or keeps increasing •         Whether Tech Mahindra holds up next quarter since a European auto project got delivered early and that reverses •         The US midterms on Nov 3 since US elections have moved these stocks quite a bit before, both ways If you read these filings try going through the Q&A section as well in the concall. The analysts ask much sharper questions there which gives better clarity One thing I'm still stuck on. TCS said AI productivity is 10%-15%. Tech Mahindra said rivals are promising 70%-80% over 5 yrs deal. Not sure which one to actually believe This isn't it for the IT sector but hopefully this gives you a decent starting point for your own research. Cheers! Not investment advice.