NRN spells out steps to rebuild Infy

Infosys Executive Chairman Narayana Murthy, who made a recent comeback to the company after retiring in 2011, said on Saturday that it would take at least 36 months to rebuild a “desirable” Infosys.

Speaking at the annual general meeting of the company here, Murthy admitted that the company had gone through challenging times in recent months. “However, we should all be optimists. We have overcome bigger challenges before,” Murthy said.

Explaining the present strategy of the company, Murthy said Infosys aims at focusing on consulting-led higher margin business, developing intellectual property based solutions to delink revenues from effort and winning highly competitive, large revenue yielding outsourcing projects involving application development, maintenance, testing, BPO and infrastructure. He said Infosys’ focus on the third stream (large revenue yielding outsourcing projects involving application development) was blurred. Now the “company has to focus on that aspect.”

Addressing shareholders, Murthy said the company “needs to enhance the confidence and enthusiasm among employees. “That requires “better communication with Infoscions and spending a few percentage points of the company’s revenue on employees.”

Infosys on Thursday announced an 8 per cent salary hike for employees in India and 3 per cent for on-site employees for the fiscal 2014.
Murthy said the company will focus on cost optimisation and elimination of wasteful resources.

 It will have to take some “tough decisions ,” he added. Even CEO S D Shibulal said 2012-13 has been a challenging year for the company and it has performed below expectations.

The company, for the past several quarters, has been underperforming in comparison to its peers and the shareholders’ angst in this regard was visible. Shareholders said they were assured that Infosys would regain its past glory with the return of Murthy.

However, most shareholders were unhappy with the final dividend of Rs 42 as they felt that the company should increase the percentage of dividend from a maximum of 30 per cent of its net profit to at least 50 per cent.