Srinivas sees Infy returning to industry-leading growth in 2 years

Says, initiatives taken over the last year to enhance company's competitiveness going forward

After nearly one year since Infosys, India's second largest IT services company, initiated aggressive measures to arrest shrinking market share and declining profitability, the company's President B G Srinivas is now hopeful that the Bangalore-based company will return to industry-leading growth over the next two years.

The company has already started deriving benefits from some of the sales and organisational-related changes that were effected under the leadership of co-founder N R Narayana Murthy in his second innings as the company's executive chairman. Srinivas expects that going forward these initiatives will give Infosys a competitive edge over peers.



"It is heartening to see these initiatives gain traction in the market while the journey continues," Srinivas said. "Over the next two years, I expect these interventions to enhance our competitiveness and enable us to achieve industry-leading growth," added Srinivas, who is also considered to be one of the leading internal candidates to become Infosys' CEO, post the retirement of incumbent SD Shibulal by January 2015.

Infosys had brought back Murthy in June 2013, after witnessing nearly two years of disappointing growth, to get his help in tiding over tough waters. Since his return, Murthy has initiated several measures to ensure the company returns to its earlier position as a sector leader.

Among other things, Murthy has outlined three main initiatives -- to optimise costs, improve sales effectiveness and improve delivery effectiveness. While cost optimisation has started to reflect in the company's operating profit margins already, Murthy has maintained that the other initiatives would take between nine and 36 months to start yielding results.

Srinivas said, these initiatives that the company 'embarked upon to accelerate growth' in the last one year, are focused on restructuring the organisation for 'agility'. Among others, the company has created 'smaller and nimbler' sales regions to increase focus on under-penetrated markets and industry segments.

These initiatives are also aimed at helping Infosys redesign its supply chain function and enhance the speed of fulfilling fast-changing market needs as well as renewing emphasis on winning large outsourcing deals, Srinivas said in his address to the shareholders published in the company's annual report for FY14.

He added that, the initiatives are also focused on 'enabling sales teams with a consultative mindset and better decision-making systems', along with attracting and retaining a high-performing sales force. "There are more opportunities to be harnessed through the efficiency of our growth engines," Srinivas said.

Separately, talking about client spending and sentiment, Srinivas said, infrastructure and cloud adoption remain key areas of spending by clients. He added that digital transformation, which includes social, mobile, cloud and analytics, is an area of priority spending by clients, particularly in industry like financial service, manufacturing and retail.

"While economic recovery continues to be fragile, businesses are beginning to feel optimistic," Srinivas said. "Some are initiating large business transformation programmes with an aim to simplify, by consolidating enterprise resource planning (ERP) landscapes; modernising infrastructure and creating alternative operating models with new partners."

Srinivas added that there has been an uptick in discretionary spending in the manufacturing sector, particularly in the automotive space. "Clients are also leveraging IT for leaner R&D, and engineering services, creating more opportunities for us." he said.