Dear Stakeholder,
Demand for our services showed remarkable resilience even as other parts of the technology universe deflated, and macroeconomic uncertainties worsened in our major markets throughout FY 2023. Our revenue for the year was ₹225,458 crore, a growth of 17.6% over the prior year (13.7% in constant currency).
This growth came with an industry leading operating margin of 24.1%. Our Net Margin was at 18.7%. The Earnings Per Share was at ₹115.19, a growth of 11.2% over the prior year.
From an industry vertical perspective, growth in FY 2023 was led by Retail and Consumer Business, which grew 22.1%, Life Sciences and Healthcare which grew 20.2% and Communications, Media and Technology which grew 18.1%. Banking, Financial Services and Insurance grew 14.6% while Manufacturing grew 14.1%. Others, which make up 8.2% of revenues, grew 22.5%.
By geographic markets, North America grew 24.2%, UK grew 11.4% and Continental Europe grew 9.2%. Among emerging markets, Latin America grew 24.8%, India grew 14.9%, Middle East & Africa grew 12.5% while Asia Pacific grew 7.1%.
The Board has recommended a final dividend of ₹24 per share, bringing the total dividend for the year to ₹115 per share.
For the full year, the company’s shareholder payout was ₹42,079 crore, 108.2% of the free cash flow during the year.
Innovate, Adapt, Thrive
Our performance this year reflects how much of an enterprise staple IT services have become. Our full services capability enables us to help our clients thrive, in good times and bad. During the up-cycle, we help clients accelerate and expand their technology-led innovation to differentiate themselves and drive growth. On the down cycle, we help them adapt, using technology to drive the efficiency, agility and resilience needed to cope with a faltering economy, and prepare for better times ahead.
Cloud transformation remained a high priority area for enterprises in FY 2023, with greater focus on execution. They engaged us to take up the modernization and migration of their bigger, more complex workloads. The breadth and depth of our cloud expertise, our scale, deep domain knowledge, strong partnership credentials with the hyperscalers and our portfolio of intellectual property on the cloud, give us a distinct competitive edge in this phase of the cloud adoption cycle.
We also helped clients cope with the challenge of managing cloud expenses. In some cases, it required rearchitecting their application stack to be more cloud native, capable of dynamically ramping up resource consumption during periods of high demand, and automatic ramping down at other times. Elsewhere, we offered our FinOps advisory and cloud managed services to rein in cloud costs.
Newer developments like generative AI, large language models, and quantum computing triggered more experimentation and innovation by our clients. Our investments in research and innovation across different industries, and our Pace innovation architecture have positioned us well to partner with them in these initiatives.
The adoption of cloud technologies continues to drive innovation within enterprises. The availability of compute, data and networks at scale provides access to powerful technologies like advanced analytics and machine learning, applied to diverse areas like computer vision, text and speech processing, in domains like dynamic supply chain optimization, new molecule discovery in life sciences and usage-based pricing of insurance coverage.
Our Agile Innovation Cloud offering, where we create dedicated, location-independent innovation teams to help clients accelerate and scale up their innovation, gained further traction in FY 2023. 7 new clients signed up during the year, bringing the total to 30 clients.
Some of the emerging innovation themes that we helped customers with include ecosystem and multi-industry models underpinned by technologies like data marketplaces, API and blockchain, in industries like transportation and public sector; AI-powered autonomous robotics in the logistics industry, and new applications for digital twins in the BFSI, Telecom and Retail industries.
Within our growth and transformation (G&T) portfolio, business model innovation continued to be a key theme. For example, for a large Fortune 500 electric gas utility, we built the service delivery platform central to their new business model of providing warranty repair, refurbishment and replacement services of various home appliances to households.
Ingram Micro, one of the largest technology distributors in the US, engaged us as a partner to power their pivot into e-commerce and achieve their mission to transform from a traditional distributor to a platform company that does distribution. Tapestry Inc, a leading New York-based house of iconic accessories and lifestyle brands such as Coach, Kate Spade, & Stuart Weitzman, partnered with TCS to drive their omnichannel modernization and transform the customer journey experience.
Other G&T themes, such as M&A and sustainability continued to bring in high-profile deal wins and new strategic engagements for us in FY 2023. Elsewhere in this report, you can read about the work we did for Philips Domestic Appliances in its journey to be a standalone company, and how we helped Eversource Energy pursue its carbon neutrality aspirations.
Digital transformation, which began in the front office, towards enhancing customer experience, made further inroads within the enterprise during the year, unlocking tremendous value in the middle and back office. As critical technologies such as machine vision and conversational systems get better with the use of AI, our Machine First™ approach is helping clients use them innovatively in the back office, embedding them into reimagined processes to drive greater velocity, agility, throughput and resilience – which, among other things, also enhances customer experience.
Applied at scale, across a broad set of business or IT operations, this can result in an entirely new operating model that significantly boosts our clients’ competitiveness. As macroeconomic uncertainty increased in the second half of the year, we saw clients adapting by reprioritizing their spends and showing greater interest in such operating model transformations.
TCS Cognix™, our AI-driven human machine collaboration suite, has been a game changer, enabling faster transformations that deliver concrete business benefits within months. Its 600 pre-built configurable and reusable digital solutions enable plug and play transformation of a range of business and technology functions, horizontal and vertical. Nearly 300 of our clients have used it to transform their business and IT operations.
In traditional outsourcing deals, we saw more multi-services integrated deals. By consolidating multiple elements of the operation stack – processes, applications, and the underlying technology and infrastructure – with a single strategic partner, clients not only achieve greater accountability, but also reduce complexity and derisk their larger business transformations. The same rationale is driving more vendor consolidation initiatives that favor a few strategic partners with end-to-end service offerings, the right innovation capabilities and scale.
All these trends play to our strengths. Our scale, structure, and ability to bring together different capabilities into a seamless service delivery team, helped us win several large deals throughout the year.
Investing in People
The supplyside challenges of the last two years peaked in the first half of FY 2023, with employee churn reaching unprecedented levels. We broke out of the vicious cycle of hiring and counter-hiring within the industry by investing in onboarding an unprecedent number of fresh engineers – over 110,000 in FY 2022 and over 44,000 in FY 2023 – and training them on the technologies most in demand.
In FY 2023, we focused on utilizing the spare capacity built up in the prior year, and recalibrated our hiring especially as attrition started falling in the second half of the year. Our LTM attrition in IT services for the year was 20.1%. Net addition in FY 2023 was 22,600, and the closing headcount was 614,795. Our workforce continued to be very diverse, with over 150 nationalities represented and with women making up 35.7% of the employee base.
Our investments in organic talent development continue to deliver exceptional outcomes. In FY 23, TCSers logged 48.3 million learning hours, and acquired nearly 6 million competencies. Popular technologies witnessed unprecedented levels of interest from our employees. During the year, 53,000 TCSers acquired certification on hyperscaler cloud skills, bringing the total number to over 110,000, making TCS one of the Top 2 partners to the largest cloud providers.
Caring for Communities
We continued to work with communities across the world, pursuing our long-standing commitment to programs in the areas of skills development, bridging of digital divides and STEM education. In FY 2023, we estimate that our community initiatives touched the lives of over 4 million beneficiaries – women, youth and members of marginalized communities.
Our large programs in India around literacy, digital entrepreneurship and youth skilling continued to gain scale. Likewise, our STEM initiatives outside India. goIT is shaping the next generation of digital innovators in 42 countries, while Ignite my Future in School program has doubled its original goal, serving over 2 million students and educators in five geographies worldwide since inception in 2017.
On the environmental front, we continue to make good progress on our net zero journey. We have brought down our absolute carbon footprint across scope 1 and scope 2 emissions by 71% over base year 2016, meeting our target two years ahead of time. This was despite increased electricity consumption in FY 2023 from employees’ return to office. In addition to enterprise-wide initiatives for energy efficiency, we have also significantly increased our renewable energy. Renewable energy sources today make up 55% of the total (7.25% in 2016).
Our employee volunteer program called HOPE (Hours of Purpose by Employees) resulted in over 2.8 million hours of volunteering effort towards promoting issues most relevant in their local communities, such as mental health, climate action, circularity, education, skilling, mentoring, and conservation.
So long, farewell
This year marks a key milestone in my journey with TCS, and an important transition point for the company, as I step down from my role as CEO and MD on 31st May 2023. It has been an absolute privilege and an unparalleled learning experience to lead our company in the last six years, a period of tremendous growth and transformation for us.
On a more personal note, I am grateful to Chandra, our Chairman, for his mentorship and backing over the years, to our Board members for their guidance, and to all our customers for the confidence they reposed in us. I take this opportunity to thank all my colleagues whose support and trust made my journey as CEO successful, satisfying and unforgettable. I also thank all my fellow TCSers whose energy, dedication and aspirations continue to power the organization’s success.
I have had the pleasure of interacting with some of you in person over the last decade. Your feedback and insights helped me learn and shaped my worldview. Thank you for all your support and encouragement.
With enterprises relying on technology ever more to drive their competitive differentiation, technology intensity is rising and on a secular basis, the share of IT services within overall tech spending is also going up. I am confident that TCS’ best years are ahead, and I look forward to watching the company’s continued success from outside.
Best Regards,
Rajesh Gopinathan
Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director
(For FY 2022-23)
