What the vacant seats at TCS mean

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₹40,000 per candidate over and above their regular fees if they manage to make senior candidates join in less than 30 days. The urgency to get experienced employees in programs like Flutter, Windchill, Workday, and SAP, among others, is a sign that markets are opening up for the IT services firm.

However, despite the advances being made by AI, the $250-billion Indian IT sector continues to heavily rely on engineers taking on coding work for banks, manufacturing companies, and retail giants, among others, which is why hiring assumes significance in determining an IT company’s health. On Friday, when it declared its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings, TCS’s management said the company would growth faster in the current fiscal year (FY25) than the 4.1% dollar revenue growth it achieved in the previous fiscal.

However, the management was still a tad shy from acknowledging if growth will be in double-digits. TCS, which does not give forward-looking guidance, has maintained that it aspires to clock a double-digit growth.

“Headcount declined sequentially for the third straight quarter and finished down in FY24 vs FY23, which all else equal is not encouraging for demand inflection," Keith Bachman, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a note dated 12 April. “Net, we think the spend environment could improve in 2HCY24, though we believe there remains uncertainty on the slope of improvement especially given ongoing macro uncertainty including US interest rates." At the heart of this scepticism is the fact that two-thirds of TCS’s business grew less than its headline 4.1% growth last fiscal.