Don't see major impact on March quarter biz due to coronavirus: HCL Tech

HCL Technologies on Monday said it is not expecting any significant impact on business in March quarter on account of the coronavirus outbreak, and that booking during the period has largely been "on track" with significant part of closures happening in January.

HCL Tech said it had invoked 'Business Continuity Plan' and 'Risk Management Framework' quite early to minimise the impact on its employees and clients, and added that its exposure to the more-impacted verticals is "not significant".

"While the impact on this quarter's numbers is yet to be quantified, we don't expect it to be significant. Our exposure to the more impacted verticals are not significant. Booking during this quarter has largely been on track as significant part of closures happened in January," HCL Tech said in a statement on the likely impact on business.

The company said its business model is a healthy mix of recurring product revenues, managed services and discretionary spend-led professional services, and that its exposure to verticals like Oil and Gas, Travel and Hospitality, High-End Retail is in single digit.

"We recognise our investments in risk management systems and processes over the last several years are helping us to minimise the short-term impact and to be adequately prepared for the medium term, if it gets worse.

"We are also confident our business model will help us to emerge stronger in the longer term as it has been built for resilience during tough times," it said.

The company said 76 per cent of its India-based employees and 92 per cent of employees in other geographies are enabled to work from home, and that the company has not witnessed any outages or major disruption in operations with this newer format of delivery.

HCL said it has a well-defined and structured pandemic policy in place that attaches highest importance to employee safety and health as well as client commitments.

"We are actively engaged with our clients and have executed the client-specific and HCL internal operations-centric Business Continuity Plan that ensures continuity in delivering to our client and employee commitments," the statement said.

The company is constantly reviewing the situation at hand with utmost priority and fully complying with all government advisories and recommendations.

"Given the extended nature of this situation, we have looked at ensuring that we put in medium-term sustainable measures in place to ensure continuity of all our operations and client deliverables. We have been successful in achieving this as of today," the company said.

It said that in some geographies, a limited set of employees are working from offices, wherever it is permissible by the government and local authorities.

"It is noteworthy that we have not witnessed any outages or major disruption in operations with this newer format of work from home delivery," HCL Tech said.

The company said it has been monitoring the COVID-19 outbreak since late January and had invoked its Business Continuity Plan and Risk Management Framework quite early to minimise the impact on its employees and clients.

"The situation arising out of this outbreak and its rapid spread across the world is unprecedented and is extremely dynamic. The economic impact is visible with varying degrees of intensity across multiple countries where we operate," it said.