Dear Stakeholder,
It is my privilege to be writing to you from this desk as we near 20 years to our listing since August 25, 2004. Over the last two decades, your company’s Revenue and Net Profits have grown at a compounded annual growth rate of over 18% each.
It has been almost a full year since my transition as CEO, and I am happy to report that it has been a very stable and seamless experience for all our stakeholders. During this period, we refocused on our industry and technology expertise, emphasized and refreshed the core values that define who we are as a company, and doubled down on customer centricity and employee empathy.
We had a strong finish to the fiscal year FY 2024, with revenue for the year at ₹240,893 crore. This is, a growth of 6.8% over the previous year (3.4% in constant currency). Demand for our services showed remarkable resilience as macroeconomic uncertainties and geopolitical volatilities continued in major markets through the year.
This growth came with an industry leading operating margin of 24.6%1. More importantly we exited the year with a quarterly operating margin of 26% in Q4, demonstrating our commitment to the margin band of 26% to 28%. Our Net Margin was at 19.3%1.
The Earnings Per Share was at ₹127.742, a growth of 10.9% over the prior year.
Among the Business Segments, Manufacturing grew 10.6%, Life Sciences and Healthcare grew 8.7%, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance grew 5.6%, Consumer Business grew 4.9%, Communication, Media and Technology grew 4.6%, while Others grew 14.5% (YoY in reported currency).
Among geographies, growth was led by emerging markets: Latin America grew 21.1%, India grew 20.3%, Middle East & Africa grew 14.8% while Asia Pacific grew 4.0%. The UK grew 17.7%, Continental Europe grew 6.5%. North America grew 2.3% (YoY in reported currency).
We are seeing strong deal momentum across markets resulting in double-digit growth in our TCV of US$ 42.7 billion, which reflects our deepening partnership with our clients and gives us optimism for the medium to long term growth outlook.
In keeping with our capital allocation policy of returning substantial free cashflow to shareholders, the Board has recommended a final dividend of ₹28 per share, bringing the total dividend for the year to ₹73 per share. The company also successfully completed its fifth buyback program, distributing
₹17,000 crore to shareholders. For the full year, the company’s shareholder payout was ₹47,445 crore, which will be our largest payout to date. Our average shareholder payout has been more than 100% during the last 5 years.
The rise of GenAI has been catching customers’ attention, and it promises a leap in productivity and accelerates the creation of new products and services. Although still in the early stages of adoption, the use of GenAI is expected to transform every industry.
Business Overview
Established in 1968, our company has been a pioneer in the IT industry, across various technology cycles. At each of these defining moments, we refocused our investments, reinvented ourselves, and helped clients transform their businesses to stay ahead of the technology curve.
During FY 2024, customers continued reprioritization of projects in favor of those which are considered business-critical and where ROI realization is likely faster. We continue to see pressure on customers’ discretionary spending. The recently won deals are converting into revenue as planned, the ongoing engagements started during the pandemic are being re-examined for the incremental value generated. While transformation remains a key ask, customers are expecting the same to be funded through savings from operations. Hence, the key engagement themes we saw during the year were around cost optimization and cloud transformation.
Demand was led by vendor consolidation, cloud migration and transformation, customer and employee experience enhancement, operating model transformation, business process optimization, supply chain initiatives, sustainability, AI enablement i.e. creating a cloud and data foundation for AI, and early-stage AI-infused transformational engagements.
Today, clients are seeing cloud as a strategy for business transformation and growth. The shift to cloud-native products and platforms is being fast-tracked, to achieve increased collaboration, security, scalability and efficiency. Hybrid, multi-cloud platforms are now becoming mainstream. Cloud adoption is a catalyst for innovation, and a strategy for business and growth itself. It provides the unifying digital fabric that forms the foundation for a connected future—one that continues to unfold with each technological advancement, including generative AI (GenAI).
The rise of GenAI has been catching customers’ attention, and it promises a leap in productivity and accelerates the creation of new products and services. Although still in the early stages of adoption, the use of GenAI is expected to transform every industry. Many of our clients who are early adopters have begun experimentation and exploration on various use cases of GenAI, with our help.
The Innovation Edge
Exploring innovative uses of GenAI continues to be a key focus area. We are helping our customers to use AI to: (i) Assist, leveraging AI to supplement tacit knowledge with contextual knowledge to boost work effectiveness (ii) Augment, accelerating elite performance through collaborative intelligence, where humans and machines complement and magnify each other’s talents, and (iii) Transform, leaping to a knowledge-driven superstructure with fast, consistent, and high-quality decision output to deliver new ways of working and the full realization of enterprise-wide AI. We have created one of the largest AI / ML and GenAI talent pools in the industry. We have doubled down on partnerships in areas such as AI, cloud, quantum computing and cybersecurity. These early investments have given TCS a head start in being a partner in our customers’ technology adoption journey.
With our contextual knowledge and domain expertise, engineering DNA and intellectual capital, we have been the preferred partner for many customers in their strategic initiatives. This year, we signed several deals that are industry- defining in nature. We have included narratives about the work we did for BSNL – building an indigenous network, a true nation building project and how we built an advanced post trading platform for SIX in this Integrated Annual Report.
Our continued investments in Research and Innovation, and in building intellectual property, have further strengthened our transformational credentials. Many of our earlier R&I programs have matured into successful platforms and solutions which performed very well this year and helped differentiate our growth. We leveraged TCS HOBS™ to transform Celcom Axiata Berhad’s core business support systems. For PostNord, TCS TwinX™ is helping increase sorter capacity, remove bottlenecks, and improve the collection and distribution sort plan. Similarly, TCS Omnistore™ is helping European home improvement company Kingfisher orchestrate a faster, smoother, and seamless checkout experience.
We launched several initiatives this year to inculcate a strong engineering culture among our employees and build deeper skills in market relevant technologies like Cloud, AI, Cyber Security and more. TCS is collaborating with all the hyperscalers and entering new partnerships with other important players in the AI ecosystem to upskill at scale and build AI computing infrastructure to develop AI solutions for our customers.
Building a Skilled Workforce
Our approach to talent is strategic — we consider our employees as key stakeholders in our growth. Our ability to cycle through different technology and business model changes, continuously embrace new knowledge and stay relevant, defines us and gives us a significant edge over our competitors.
We have a strength of 601,546 employees, and our LTM attrition in IT services was 12.5%, down by 760 bps over the previous year. Our workforce continued to be very diverse, with over 152 nationalities represented and with women making up 35.6% of the employee base.
We launched several initiatives this year to inculcate a strong engineering culture among our employees and build deeper skills in market relevant technologies like Cloud, AI, Cyber Security and more. TCS is collaborating with all the hyperscalers and entering new partnerships with other important players in the AI ecosystem to upskill at scale and build AI computing infrastructure to develop AI solutions for our customers.
In FY 2024, TCSers logged 51 million learning hours, and acquired nearly 5 million competencies. A culture of lifelong learning and innovation, by closely linking learning with careers and rewards, has placed us as the Global Top Employer for the 9th consecutive year, across 32 countries — placing us as one in only 16 organizations worldwide to achieve this status.
Embracing Aalingana
We have fully adopted Project Aalingana, the Tata group’s sustainability roadmap and the aim is to be net zero by 2045, integrating sustainability into business strategy and concentrating on three interlinked pillars of the project, i.e., promoting the decarbonization of our company and value chains; utilizing a systematic, circular economy approach to reduce resource usage and waste; and protecting and regenerating the environment.
We continue to make good progress in our net zero journey, on the environmental front. TCS had set a target to reduce its absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 70% by 2025 and become net zero by 2030. We are well ahead of our initial Scope 1 and 2 targets and have achieved a reduction of 80% in Scope 1 and 2 emissions in FY 2024 over a baseline of 2016. We are doing this by increasing use of renewable sources of energy and improving energy efficiency.
The company’s strategy for reducing emissions includes addition of more green buildings to the company’s real estate portfolio, reduction of IT system power usage, responsible sourcing, and the use of TCS Clever Energy™, which leverages IoT, machine learning and AI to optimize energy consumption across campuses.
TCS is not only improving its own sustainability but also helping clients develop and implement their sustainability strategies and improve outcomes. We have built a comprehensive suite of over 200 offerings in sustainability services and solutions across different industry verticals. These solutions help enterprises decarbonize their operations and create net-zero pathways, addressing biodiversity loss and growing inequity. We help customers embed circularity in their products and services, by helping design agile, resilient, and sustainable supply chains and promoting reuse, recapture, and recycling.
Passion for Our Purpose
TCS is meaningfully connecting marginalized groups, including women and youth, to economic opportunities. We continue to work with communities across the world, pursuing our long-standing commitment to programs in the areas of education, literacy for livelihood, skilling for employment, and digital entrepreneurship; while exploring areas of healthcare, digital inclusion, water, climate and sustainability. Through clearly defined focus areas and strategic programs, our work has impacted the lives of over 7.1 million people. We are working with public and social sector organizations to help close the literacy gap among the most marginalized adults, helping them access government entitlements and improving access to livelihood. We are empowering students in government schools with 21st century skills, introducing them to careers of the future, while empowering and building capacity of the teachers and education system.
By working with other private sector organizations, we are helping marginalized youth transition from college to meaningful careers across a variety of sectors. Our digital entrepreneurs are connecting disadvantaged communities in rural and aspirational districts across India with front line services in social welfare, banking, finance, insurance, health, e-commerce, logistics and more.
Our employee volunteer program called HOPE (Hours of Purpose by Employees) resulted in over 6.7 million hours dedicated to purpose projects across dimensions of biodiversity, mental health, climate action, circularity, literacy, education, skilling, mentoring, conservation and more covering the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Greater Governance
Governance at TCS encompasses ensuring ethical and transparent business conduct, addressing sustainability risks and opportunities and aligning robust disclosure requirements under the aegis of the board. At TCS, the Tata Code of Conduct serves as a guide for all employee behavior.
TCS consciously embeds the highest standards of governance in its operations. We have a holistic compliance framework and an integrated governance structure that encourages a strong commitment to global Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure standards for promoting transparency and accountability. As part of the Tata Group, we have long recognized the ESG stewardship as core to our purpose. We have a proud legacy of pioneering positive change, not just within the industry but in the communities where we operate as well, and our commitment remains steadfast.
Looking Ahead
Our all-time high order book, continued deal flow and pipeline velocity give us confidence in our business momentum. Looking forward, we see greater opportunities ahead, as businesses become more technology-intensive and depend on technology to drive competitive differentiation and transform their industries. Our integrated business model which drives value creation for all our stakeholders, will continue to help us benefit from each new wave of technology change, and be a force multiplier for our growth and leadership in years to come. We thank you for your continued support in our journey ahead.
Best regards,
K Krithivasan
Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director
*Excludes settlement of legal claim
