Mumbai, India: Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) reported on Thursday double-digit growth in revenue for the April-June quarter, with Asia's largest outsourcer helped by a weak rupee and greater spending from banking customers.
The leader of India's $315 billion software services industry, TCS earns the bulk of its revenue from Western clients.
The Mumbai-headquartered firm and its rivals have battled lacklustre demand in recent years due to geopolitical uncertainty, even as clients hold back on tech spending as AI tools from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI offer new ways of doing labour-intensive work that was previously outsourced.
But the company's revenue for the June quarter beat forecasts, rising 13.9 percent year-on-year to 722.75 billion rupees ($7.57 billion).
Analysts had on average expected a topline of a little over 720 billion rupees.
The firm's net profit for the three month-period that ended June 30 grew 4.6 percent year-on-year to hit 133.49 billion rupees, just shy of the consensus estimate of 134.5 billion rupees.
The quarterly figures have been partly boosted by the rupee's slide against the dollar.
Indian IT firms normally bill their clients in foreign currencies, but spend in rupees when it comes to expenses like employee wages.
Chief executive K Krithivasan said the June quarter results reflected "continued growth momentum... despite geopolitical and macro-economic headwinds", adding that a string of key AI transformation deals also helped.
"We delivered a strong order book of $9.5 billion, including a marquee AI-led transformation deal with SKF, while continuing to add clients across key revenue bands and scaling our AI business to a $2.6 billion annualized revenue run rate," Krithivasan said in an earnings release.
Many Indian software outsourcers, including TCS, have increased investments in AI tools, hoping to both earn new business and cut costs by boosting operational efficiencies.
Last month, TCS chairman N Chandrasekaran warned that the company would hire fewer people as it expects to add "half a million AI agents" in its workforce.
The remarks came on the back of plans announced last year to spend up to $7 billion to build a one gigawatt data centre unit in India.
