TCS expects US visa regime to turn 'benign'

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) believes that with the political environment improving, visa regime would get more ‘benign’ in the US.

According to a recent report in Computerworld, TCS had received 7,469 H-1B visa approvals in 2012, after 9,281 visas issued to US-headquartered Cognizant in 2012.
In an analyst call last week, TCS CFO Rajesh Gopinathan and head of Investor Relations Kedar Shirali said, “Among geographies, US is seeing broad-based optimism. Better outlook in US is driven by some uptick in discretionary spending, where the demand is more project-centric.”

The company added that in Europe, while the broader economy remains weak, there is increasingly greater acceptance of the outsourcing model and nature of work is largely skewed towards traditional services. In January, while announcing the third quarter financial results, TCS had said that non-Indian nationals, representing 112 nationalities, formed 7.6 per cent of the total employee base. Indian companies have always been accused of job-snatching from the US nationals by bringing Indian on H1-B visas.

Thus, Indian IT have now started hiring in the US with Infosys recently announcing the hiring of 200 employees in Atlanta.

Angel Broking analyst Ankita Somani said that the management sounded confident of FY '14 being a better year than FY '13 as clients seem to have a better handle on the kind of projects they want to execute and have made plans to spend on IT considering all the challenges.

The company has not taken a call on wage hikes yet and it will wait till the end of the quarter before finalising hikes.

“Overall, demand optimism remains intact with few pockets of weakness like telecom and hi-tech. The company expects BFSI to grow in line with the company average going ahead,” Somani added.