Mahalingam confident of TCS' high margins

Unlike V Balakrishnan’s exit from Infosys Ltd, Seturaman Mahalingam’s retirement as chief financial officer of TCS would likely be smoother. But it also means an era at TCS is coming to an end.

In a few days, Mahalingam, better known as Maha, will complete 42 years in the company and by the time he retires on February 9, 2013, he would complete a decade as the CFO of TCS.

Maha at this point is non-committal on what he plans to do after he retires as he reaches 65. He, however, said he would continue his association with IT industry and use his experience in finance.

Maha is also among the few handful CFOs in the IT sector who have focused on maintaining high margins for companies even as their peers took a different route and maintained low margins. “There are two aspects to margins — pricing and cost. There is a margin structure for this business and I do not think it will go down. This consist of having an employee structure that is responsive. It is about building efficiencies into the system. Till we are able to do that there is no danger to this structure,” said Maha.

TCS has said it would maintain its operating margins at about 27 per cent in the current financial year. For the second quarter of 2012-13, the company reported a drop of 76 basis points in operating profits margins.