HCL Tech's GenAI Pivot

As the second-longest serving CEO of HCLTech, C. Vijayakumar leads the company's tech offerings in the Al/GenAl era.

- Rukmini Rao

C.VIJAYAKUMAR or CVK as he is popularly known is HCL Technologies second-longest serving CEO after founder Shiv Nadar. Since he took over in 2016 (and appointed MD in 2021), HCLTech’s revenue has almost doubled from $6.9 billion in FY17 to $13.2 billion in FY24.

In the last fiscal, HCLTech grew the fastest among India-headquartered IT service firms at 5% on a constant currency basis while peers TCS and Infosys grew 3.4% and 1.4%, respectively. The company also saw increased free cash flow of 27.7%. On a YoY basis, while IT and business services grew 6.2%, engineering services grew 1.6%.

The last fiscal was a rather difficult year for the IT industry, as clients squeezed discretionary spends. HCL’s digital business (which relies heavily on discretionary spends) portfolio (which contributes to 37% of revenues), saw a 5.3% YoY increase with Cloud transformation and cyber security along with the company’s SaaS services clients aiding growth. “What worked for HCL is the all-weather portfolio that has discretionary, non-discretionary and IP products,” says CVK.