Cognizant displaces Infy to become 2nd largest Indian IT firm

The firm clocks highest revenue growth rate among Indian IT companies

US-headquartered firm Cognizant clocked the highest growth rate of 20.1% in revenues among the top five India-based IT services providers last year, global research firm Gartner said today.

The NASDAQ-listed firm also displaced Infosys as the second-largest IT services provider in 2012 with a worldwide revenue of $7.1 billion, Gartner said in a statement.

"Cognizant displaced Infosys to become the second-largest Indian IT services provider and Cognizant experienced the highest growth rate among the top five providers with an increase of 20.1% in 2012," Gartner Research Director Arup Roy said.

The revenues of the top 5 India-based IT services providers worldwide rose by over 13% to $34.3 billion (around Rs 1,900 crore) last year from $30.3 billion in 2011.

TCS leads the IT services providers with revenue of $10.9 billion, followed by Cognizant ($7.1 billion), Infosys ($6.7 billion), Wipro ($5.7 billion) and HCL Technologies ($3.9 billion) in 2012.

"The top five Indian providers grew 13.3% to reach $34.3 billion in 2012, exceeding the IT services industry growth of 2%," it said.

Gartner views Indian players as those who mainly have a India-based delivery model and management. Most firms are headquartered in India, but a few like Genpact, Cognizant, Syntel and iGate, are headquartered in the US. However, their delivery, management, operating style, among other things, are like those of other Indian providers.

However, Gartner said that the growth rate of India-based providers has been slowing for some years, with this trend being more pronounced in 2012.

But the growth rate is still quite high compared with the IT services worldwide or the growth of the top 10 global IT services providers. The global top 10 providers, however, are larger in their base revenue and more diversified than the India-based providers, Gartner added.

"The top five Indian service providers have continuously chipped away market share from the large multinational corporation providers. In the past five years, they have been winning large outsourcing deals (those with a total contract value of more than $100 million)," Roy said.

Their target customer segment still remain the Fortune 1,000 companies.

"There is a strong focus on, and investments in, cloud, analytics, mobility, infrastructure and knowledge processes. India-based providers have become much more aggressive in infrastructure management because it offers them the potential to grow bottom-up within accounts," Roy said.