IT stocks gain on upbeat US jobs data

Five IT stocks rose by 0.06% to 1.15% at 11:25 IST on BSE after an upbeat US labor-market report for December 2014, underscored strength in the world's largest economy.

Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was up 248.05 points, or 0.92%, to 27,150.14.

Among IT stocks, Tech Mahindra (up 1.15%), TCS (up 0.49%), and HCL Technologies (up 0.11%) gained.

Infosys rose 0.06%. Due to cross currency headwinds, analysts expects Infosys' management to prune the company's revenue growth guidance in dollar terms for the year ending 31 March 2015 (FY 2015) when the company announces its Q3 December 2014 results on Friday, 9 January 2015. The IT major is widely expected to prune its FY 2015 dollar revenue growth to 7%-8%, from 7%-9%.

At the time of announcement of Q2 September 2014 results, Infosys had on 10 October 2014 retained its earlier guidance of 7% to 9% growth in revenue in dollar terms for FY 2015. At that time, the company had raised its revenue growth guidance in rupee terms due to rupee depreciation. The company had raised the revenue growth guidance for FY 2015 in rupee terms to 6.7%-8.7% from earlier 5.6%-7.6% at that time. The revised guidance was based on rupee dollar conversion rate of 61.

Wipro rose 0.5% on reports the company won a $400 million, multi-year IT infrastructure management contract from Swiss engineering giant ABB. According to reports, Wipro will maintain the back-end technology operations for Zurich-based ABB for five years.

The BSE IT index had outperformed the market over the past one month till 7 January 2015, falling 5.19% compared with 5.44% fall in the Sensex. The index had however underperformed the market in past one quarter, sliding 4.75% as against Sensex's 2.42% rise.

A report on Wednesday, 7 Janaury 2015, from Automatic Data Processing showed that US private payrolls increased by more than expected 241,000 in December 2014. The US Labor Department reports monthly payroll data for December 2014, tomorrow, 9 January 2015.

US is the biggest outsourcing market for the Indian IT firms.

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