L&T Tech Services goes after new streams of revenue amid Covid-19 crisis

Engineering services firm, L&T Technology Services (LTTS) has altered many of its business models in line with the changing needs of clients in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. The L&T group company has set up 5 internal teams, which are working in these new areas and have started submitting new proposals to clients as the company chases new revenue streams.

"We have reworked on multiple areas as we understand that the same model is not going to work during this (COVID) period. In the last 4-6 weeks, I had held discussions with top management of 80 of our clients. We have also set up five teams internally, who are working on new areas and are going to propose those offerings to customers," said Keshab Panda, MD & CEO, L&T Technology Services.

The Mumbai-headquartered engineering services firm's revenue growth rate stood at 11 per cent in FY20 as compared to 26 per cent in FY19 owing to some client specific issues. In FY18, the company swa a revenue growth of 20 per cent.

As Covid-19 hits the global economy hard, the company refrained from giving any growth guidance for the ongoing fiscal.

However, Panda said recovery would be faster for the firm once the severity of the pandemic came down.

"We need to wait and watch how the growth is going to be. But, I know for sure that medical, hi-tech and telecom (verticals) are going to come back by the end of Q1 and beginning of Q2. Also, we have bagged two deals worth $45 million in these difficult times, which gives us the confidence that we will come out fast," Panda said. But, demand in oil & gas and automotive verticals would take time to recover," he added.

The engineering services industry is going through difficult times with SoWs (statement of work) of many projects getting cancelled or delayed as employees working on these projects were unable to fly back to India, due to the travel ban. Despite this, project cancellations, vendor consolidation is also being seen in the market.

"We have got calls from customers to take over work which was previously done by smaller vendors. So, vendor consolidation is happening. Even we are getting offers from clients to take over their captive centres with certain number of employees and deliver full scale services as these centres are not able to deliver," said Panda.

When asked about the company's hiring plans for the current fiscal, Panda said that L&T Technology Services was planning to go to the campuses for recruitment, but offers would be fewer in number. "Hiring will be slow given that we have bench. Around 1,400 engineers are being trained in nine technologies as part of our reskilling effort now," Panda said, adding that the company did not plan to downsize its employee count and would continue with its appraisal-based retention system.