HCL Tech Q3 net profit up 13% to Rs 2,944 crore

New Delhi: IT major HCL Technologies on Friday posted a 13 per cent rise in its consolidated net profit at Rs 2,944 crore for the December 2019 quarter and said it expects to clock up to 17 per cent growth in FY20 revenue on the back of pipeline being at a "historic peak".

The company had registered a net profit of Rs 2,605 crore in the year-ago period as per Indian Accounting Standards. Its revenue from operations grew 15.5 per cent to Rs 18,135 crore in the quarter under review, from Rs 15,699 crore in the year-ago period.

"We have once again delivered a great quarter...this quarter, we have crossed an annualised run rate of $10 billion. Our pipeline stands at an all-time high, we are expecting a higher conversion of this pipeline to booking in this quarter," HCL Technologies President and CEO C Vijayakumar told reporters here.

The company's CFO Prateek Aggarwal said the company has narrowed its revenue growth outlook to 16.5-17 per cent for 2019-20 in constant currency terms, from its previous forecast of 15-17 per cent topline growth in constant currency terms.

"We had earlier guided to a wider range of about 15-17 per cent but now that we have only one quarter to go and we have better visibility, we have narrowed down the range...it is coming from both sides - organic and inorganic," he added. Compared to HCL Technologies' performance, Wipro had posted 2.2 per cent growth in its IT services revenue ($2.09 billion). It expects its March quarter IT services revenue growth to be flat to 2 per cent.

HCL Technologies' larger rival Infosys - which announced its results last week - had also revised its revenue guidance for the fiscal to 10-10.5 per cent topline growth helped by double digit growth year-to-date.

India's largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Services announced its results on Friday. Posting a 6.7 per cent rise in topline in December 2019 quarter, the Mumbai-based company said it had closed deals worth $6 billion during the said quarter. However, TCS also made it clear that it will not be able to notch a double-digit revenue growth in FY20.

For HCL Technologies, the strong performance of HCL Software was driving growth for the Products and Platform segment of the company.

"Inorganic guidance was 5-6 per cent earlier and that is now at 6 per cent. For organic, which we had said would be 10-11 per cent, now we are revising to 10.5-11 per cent," Vijayakumar explained.

In December 2018, HCL Technologies had inked an agreement to acquire select IBM software products for Rs 12,252 crore (about $1.8 billion), including earnouts of Rs 1,035 crore ($150 million). The company closed the deal on June 30, 2019.