Cognizant retaining market share post the change of guard

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Infosys was expected to pull ahead of Cognizant this year in the revenue sweepstakes, building on the 15% annual growth logged over past two years, but a pronounced tempering in sales guidance by India’s second-biggest software exporter will likely allow its Nasdaq-listed rival to widen the gap. While Infosys clocked $18.2 billion for the fiscal year-ended 2023,Cognizant reported a revenue of $19.4 billion for calendar year 2022. According to ET’s calculations, the New Jersey-based firm’s revenue for the comparable FY23 period too came in at $19.4 billion.

The gap could widen instead of narrowing as Cognizant is defending its market share since the change of guard earlier this year, according to analyst reports. “Other IT companies have gained at Cognizant’s expense. This easy tap of growth seems to be stalling as the company defends its wallet share.

Further, from a situation of no participation, it has now started winning a few large deals,” said Kotak Institutional Equities in a post-earnings note last week. Cognizant has won five 100 million deals in the June-ended quarter and nine in the first half. The company appointed former Infosys President Ravi Kumar S as chief executive earlier in January.

Under Ravi Kumar, Cognizant seems to be taking steps to defend its share and stop the leakage of revenue to peers, the report said. “The key ingredients are present—a full-service model and decent presence across all major portfolio of services such as consulting, apps, infrastructure and business process management,” the report by analysts Kawaljeet Singh, Sathish Kumar S and Vamshi Krishna said. Infosys’ lackluster guidance for FY24 may also work in Cognizant’s favour for it to retain the “second-largest homegrown IT