Hello and welcome. You are with the earnings press conference for Tata Consultancy Services. We're here to talk about our fourth quarter FY 2025 results. Without further ado, I'm going to introduce the management. We have with us K. Krithivasan, MD and CEO, our CFO, Samir Seksaria, and our CHRO, Milind Lakkad. We are live on all social media platforms and we have our friends from the media over here. So, we're gonna start with the CEO address and then followed by questions. Kriti, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Kritika. Good evening, everyone. So, we closed the financial year with our revenue exceeding $30 billion in USD. In Q4, our revenue grew by 2.5% year- on- year and degrew by 0.8% on a sequential basis. Our rupee revenue grew by 5.3% year on year to reach 64,479 crores. Our operating margin for Q4 stands at 24.2%, representing a contraction of 30 basis points over Q3. This translates to 15,601 rupee crores of operating profit. Our net margin for the quarter has come in at 19%, translating to 12,224 crores. Our EPS reached 33.79 per share. Cash from operations at 15,294 crores, representing a strong conversion of 125.1% of net profit. We had spoken about the improving market sentiments and early signs of discretionary spend revival in January, but as you know, this was not sustained due to many of the tariff discussions around tariff.
We are observing delays in decision-making and project starting with respect to discretionary investments. Despite this, all our major geographies exhibited growth on a sequential basis. On a sequential basis, North America and U.K. grew by 0.2% and Europe grew by 1.2%. New growth markets of Asia- Pacific and Middle East and Africa also grew positively this quarter. After many consecutive quarters of strong growth, India experienced a degrowth of 13.2% in this quarter. Among the verticals, on a sequential basis, BFSI grew by 1.3% and energy resources and utilities grew by 1.1%. Our communications and media and tech services business also experienced marginal growth. However, our consumer business degrow by 0.7% and life sciences and healthcare degrow by 0.8%. Manufacturing degrow marginally by 0.1%. TCS BaNCS and products and platforms continued their growth momentum. Our customer metrics continue to remain resilient.
The number of customers from whom we make more than $100 million rose by two to 64 customers on a year-on-year basis. In addition, our customer base of $1 million stands at 1,332, an increase of 38 over last year. We had a very strong order book closure again this quarter. Our order book closure for the quarter stands at $12.2 billion. This is the second highest quarterly order book and does not include any mega deals. Our order book for North America stood at $6.8 billion, for BFSI at $4 billion, consumer business at $1.7 billion. Most geographies and business groups had strong order book closures. By the end of Q4, our net employee count stood at 607,979, a net increase of 625 associates. Our IT services attrition stood at 13.3%.
We are seeing significant traction for GenAI and Agentic AI services and solutions across industries and markets. Over 580 AI for business engagements were delivered or in flight during this quarter. We are investing in Agentic AI Farm with 150-plus solutions across finance and accounting, supply chain, sourcing and procurement, HR and customer experience to enable customers in their journey towards autonomous GBS. We also enhanced our WisdomNext 2.0 platform to offer Agentic capabilities. The new features will enable faster onboarding, centralized governance, enhanced security guardrails, and a wide spectrum of pluggable solutions to accelerate innovation. For a global financial services major, we are using a combination of GenAI and TCS MasterCraft to migrate over 50 million lines of COBOL code to Java. In Q4, we applied for 267 patents and were granted 235 patents.
Coming to full year commentary, our revenue for FY 2025 stands at 255,324 crores, two lakh 55,324 crores, representing a rupee growth of 6% and USD growth of 3.8%. On a constant currency basis, we grew by 4.2% in FY 20 25 compared to 3.4% in FY 2024. Our operating for the year is 62,165 crores at a full year operating margin of 24.3%. Our net profit for FY 2025 is at INR 48,533 crores at a net margin of 19% and a full year EPS of INR 134.19. Cash from operations stands at INR 51,426 crores, which is 105.9% of the net profit. For full year, U.K. grew by 4%, Europe was flattish at 0.7% and North America degrow by 1.8%. India grew by 62.6%, LATAM by 6%, APAC by 6.8% and EMEA grew by 11.2%.
Among the verticals, banking grew by 0.7%, consumer business by 0.3%, manufacturing by 2.9% and energy resources and utilities grew by 5.1%. In FY25, life sciences degrow by 1.6%, technology services by 1.3% and comms by 9.5%. The board has proposed a final dividend of INR 30, bringing the total dividend for the year to INR 126 per share. As all of you would've noticed, we also announced the appointment of Ms. Aarthi Subramanian as President and Chief Operating Officer, and Mr. Mangesh Sathe as Chief Strategy Officer. Both are well-known industry veterans and bring immense expertise on helping businesses adopt new technology and consulting. We welcome Aarthi and Mangesh into the TCS family. With that, I hand it back to Kritika and we'll open it up for questions. Back to you, Kritika.
Thank you, Kritika. We'll start as always, Reema Tendulkar from CNBC-TV18.
Gentlemen, good evening. So, Kritika, first question is for Q4 and FY 2025, if you could just tell us what was the growth ex of BSNL? Could you put that into numbers? FY 2026, how will it compare versus FY 2025? And also, given the macro uncertainty, are we seeing deal cancellations, ramp downs or pauses? If yes, what's the extent of it and in which sectors? Samir, if you could explain the margin performance? 24.2% versus 26% on a year-on-year basis. That's a sharp decline. And next year, do you think margins, you can do better given the low margin deal BSNL ramps down? And Milind, on wage hikes and hiring. Thank you.
Yeah. You know, like, as I mentioned, like overall, while we had a degrowth of 0.8% on a sequential basis, all the major markets grew. Most of the industry verticals grew. Our international business had a positive growth. Hey, I will not be able to call out what is the extent of BSNL degrowth here.
What is the international business growth?
What would be the-
Uh-
... international business growth?
International will be approximately, sequentially, right? Point 0.6%.
0.6%. Okay. On last quarter also, I mentioned that we said CY 2025, we expect this to be better than CY 2024. We still believe based on the order book that we have announced and kind of deals we have signed, while there could be some short term uncertainties, FY 2026 would be a better year than FY 2025. Okay? On the business, overall business environment, while till February we were quite positive and we were seeing very optimistic about the quarter, we started seeing some amount of some uncertainty creeping in in March and resulting in some project delays, some decision-making delays. We have not seen any major project cancellation.
There are some ramp downs, here and there, but, there are some delays in decision making and, that's what we observe at this time. And as I said, we believe that, maybe over the course of next few months, this uncertainty should settle in and, we should be back to business.
So, Reema, from Q4 to Q4 margin perspective, I think, TCS was the only company who probably gave a full cycle of increments and also did merit-based interventions regularly through the period. That, as well as combined with, investments in capability building, in, our infrastructure expansion, further, is the overall impact.
Mm-hmm
Which we are seeing. Sequential basis, the margin impact was 30 basis points. Also on merit-based interventions or tactical interventions, which were done through this quarter, sequentially. You asked about FY 2026. Absolutely. So first, our overall guidance range or the guiding beacon which we call it, still remains at 26%-28%. There is a gap, and given the current environment, there might be some impact on the operating leverage, maybe because of utilization taking a impact. But overall, the operational levers which we have been talking about, whether it is in terms of pyramid, utilization and productivity still remain, and we believe that should able us to get through. Uncertainty provides an opportunity and we'll use this opportunity from a cost optimization perspective as well.
Can you explain the tactical interventions on margins?
Mm-hmm. Sequentially, the tactical interventions were about 100 basis points.
What were they?
They were mainly linked to promotions, merit-based promotions.
Reema, hiring, we have onboarded 42,000 trainees in FY 2025 and FY 2026 number will be similar or a little higher. Regarding wage hikes, we'll decide during the year when to make that happen.
Thank you. Next question from Sajid Mangat, NDTV Profit.
Hi, Kritika. You know, give us a sense of the discretionary spend environment, because when we spoke in January, you spoke about being, you know, optimist, optimistic about that. As we sit in April and the kind of, you know, global turmoil which is happening with respect to trade, and, as a result of it, the derivative impact which is happening on IT and IT services, how do you see discretionary spend moving from here on? Samir, on the BSNL front, now that it's getting ramped down, what could have been the impact, margin impact, on your balance sheet of FY 2025 because of BSNL? I'm talking about, you know, had BSNL not been there, the margin could have been higher by how many basis points or, you know, and because of BSNL it came down how, by how much?
And Samir, on a year-to-year basis, the numbers are almost the same, 6.01 or 6.07 lakh employees on a headcount basis. Is that the level that we'll be maintaining despite the fact that you're mentioning that you will take 40,000 or 40,000 plus employees in FY 2026?
Sajid, given the fact that this uncertainty people started experiencing towards late February, March, if I look at, if you look at our order book, okay, the discretionary spend versus non-discretionary compares quite well with Q3. But what we are seeing from the market, I would expect there would be delays in decision-making on discretionary spend if this uncertainty continues. But of course, say with yesterday's announcement, we need to see does it bring in more optimism into the market and makes the decision-making cycle faster or at least normal.
Is there an opportunity then for you guys?
See, usually in these kind of situations, many of the customers also try to do more cost optimization programs, or, so that definitely provides opportunity. Like, even in Q4, there's been a good mix of programs around operating model transformation, vendor consolidation, technology transformation. I do expect that it will provide us opportunity for gaining further market share.
So, typically we don't call out customer-specific excluding margins or what are our margins on a specific customer.
And that point was, is there a
Yes, we have been calling out, so if you do the math on the third-party expenses which we have and the cost of equipment and software, you'd be able to calculate it, and like we have been calling out the impact in the prior quarters, yes, you would expect, as a specific large transformational project ramps down, there should be a unwinding of that impact.
Sajid, hiring from the campus is strategic for us. We will continue to hire. I said this earlier and I'll say it again that our numbers would be similar to what I did earlier or better. With respect to net addition, you know, it really depends on the overall business environment and what we eventually hire from the market, depending on those skill requirements in every quarter. So-
13.3% FPV is slightly higher than 2018 on a 10-year basis.
So-
Is that a worry for you, or is there a market dynamics changing because of 18 or is it
It is not a worry. It is not a worry purely for one reason, that our quarterly annualized return has come down by almost 130 basis points this quarter.
Thank you. Next question from Shivani Shinde, Business Standard.
Hi, good evening, gentlemen. Kritika, first question to you, you obviously sounded off the U.S. tariff cautiousness in your, a re there certain verticals that we should, you know, see which will have, which will bear the brunt of these, tariffs? Are you already seeing that, when you say, you know, there have been delays or, or clients are getting, you know, pausing the discussions? And if, if, if that's so, which are these, verticals that you're seeing? Two, question where Milind can also, join in. Two significant announcements in management, the last time TCS had a COO was when N. Chandrasekaran was appointed, and then of course... I'm going back, I know, I'm sorry, but COO is a significantly important position, so just want to understand for the, you know, Ms. Aarthi Subramanian's appointment to that role.
To Samir, two questions. CapEx for next year, do you see any impact because of tariffs? Do you see, in terms of your expansion plans that TCS has? Milind, you are saying, you will take a call on wage hikes. Is that a, I mean, should we think that because of this uncertainty, there may be certain delays? Thanks.
Well, Shivani, first from the vertical perspective, as to be expected, like as the uncertainty crept in, the consumer, some industry, you also saw the U.S. consumer confidence index going down. So the impacted businesses tend to be in the consumer sector, retail sector. Retail has been impacted to some extent, and when I say retail, retail CPG and also travel, hospitality. That's probably the most impacted sector. And another sector that's been impacted is auto. Like, because of the tariffs that have been imposed on the auto sector. So I see the maximum impact in these two sector. Other than auto, manufacturing seems to be still okay. The banking financial services seem to be okay. Insurance, there is some softness, but BFS still continues to.
The demand in the environment continues to be good, which is giving us also the hope and confidence for the future. All right, comms is something that we need to watch out for. Coming to COO announcement. So first, after N. Chandrasekaran, N.G.S was also the COO. He left only one year ago. Okay. See, what we were. We were actually part of doing our strategy exercise on what are the areas of focus. When we did that, we realized that as there is a significant technology transformation happening, there are a lot of areas where we need continued focus to build talent, build partnership and hire more, gain more, strengthen the talent pool available. Because some of the talent pool we cannot depend only on homegrown talent in these new technologies.
So, we thought that there is a lot of focused activity required to drive growth and sustain the leadership in these new technologies, and therefore, in that, by that extension, drive our strategy. So then we were looking at what are the leadership options and bandwidth available? We realized that it's important that we add to the bandwidth of leadership that's already available with us. Aarthi knows, you know, I don't know how many of you know, Aarthi was with TCS before. She knows TCS quite well. She's been part of the TCS board. Also at the same time, being part as a chief digital officer of Tata Group, she has extensive experience in how the business is run and how businesses adopt technology.
So we thought it would be most appropriate for us to have someone like her as a COO, and Tata Group has been kind enough to let us have her with us, so that's her background.
Shivani.
Uh, Shivani...
Sorry, go ahead.
Sorry, Shivani, yes. I think, because of the uncertain environment, we will decide on the wage rise during the year. It can be any time, you know, but it will really depend on the environment.
Question on CapEx. If you look at this year, our CapEx was significantly higher than the previous year. We did approximately INR 5,000 crores in CapEx compared to about INR 2,700 in the previous year. In terms of investments continuing into the next year, we don't plan to scale it down. Investments in talent, in innovation, infrastructure or partnerships, currently, there are no plans to scale any of them down.
Next question from Ankur Mishra, ET Now.
Hi. I wanted to understand from you your presence in North America, which you talk about on a year-over-year basis for about 50%; it has come down to 48% or so. I want to understand what is your strategy further. Do you plan to continue to maintain this kind of geographical presence, meaning the focus on North America? Is there a rethink on that, and how has been the quarter, particularly in terms of performance, from that region? You have mentioned, Samir, about 26%-28% margins, but is there any timeline you see, you know, when you are going to achieve that, and what gives you confidence for that? Milind, I want to understand from you the attrition rate. Are you comfortable with that or you see some...
You see it as a challenging thing?
So Ankur, from a North America perspective, it will be the... It'll be a main geography, almost like a home market for us or foreseeable future. Okay, because there are large enterprises that invest in technology a lot, and we find there's greater opportunity for us to participate in those technology transformation. In the fourth quarter, like, we did grow marginally, but 0.2% on a Q on Q basis. As said, all major markets grew for us. What you see as going down to 48% is to some extent like India geography also having significant growth. So to some, b ecause of that you find some market share move from North America to rest of the world. So that's a shrinkage, but I don't think. Otherwise our focus on North America will continue.
Given the overall certainty which currently prevails, and the dynamic nature in which things are changing, it's difficult to give a timeline in terms of when. We have executed it in the past, so we are well confident in terms of how we can achieve it. What gives us confidence in terms of other levers which you talked about, the operational levers, whether it is in terms of productivity or realization, going forward to better pyramid mix, or the improvement in revenue mix also can help.
Ankur, attrition has inched up a bit from 13% to 13.3% in this quarter, but we are okay because our quarterly annualized attrition has come down this quarter by 130 basis points. So we should be, we should be okay.
Debangana Ghosh from Moneycontrol.
Hello. Kritika, my question to you, wanted to understand how is the impact of AI playing out in the discretionary spending part? Because in the industry we have started hearing that companies are trying to provide productivity gains to the customers. And also the deal tenure and deal sizes are coming down. Wanted to get a bit of understanding on how it is playing out for TCS. Samir, on the basis of that, will passing on productivity gains from AI impact the margins in the short term? And, Milind, wanted to understand. There were some reports on the TCS considering wage hikes in single digits of 4%-8% or so. If you could comment on that.
Sure.
Thank you.
Debangana, AI plays out in two ways, right? There are projects which we call AI for business. These are all transformation projects. In fact, for one of our large clients recently, we did a project where they are in the movie-making business. We are able to use AI to read the script, find out which are those scenes where are dangerous, where you need special license to take, which are the scripts where the property branding could be enhanced. So there are a lot of opportunities in here which previously you would have done in a manual way, and maybe it would've taken more time and may not have been accurate. So it creates two sets of projects, AI for business as we call it, and then AI for IT, which are primarily software engineering projects.
So the deflation in productivity is not a worry because AI for business is mostly a net new opportunity. This is AI for IT where the productivity gain comes in. So we try to do whatever projects we do, whether it's a maintenance program or it's a new development, we try to infuse AI as much as possible. And if there are any productivity gains, it depends because each one kind of productivity gain you get will vary based on the technology and based on the platform in which you are using it. So we do share those benefits with our customers and there is no, if there is if it becomes, if you have to give up productivity gain, we will give the gain to the customers as well.
But overall, we find net net, because there is a significant amount of AI for business projects also coming in. We believe net net, there won't be an overall reduction in the volume of work that's being done.
In your question on, in the short term, will there be a margin impact? There won't be, because, one, the investments which are being done are already carrying on. Second, in terms of directly linked to the productivity question, it is about sharing gains which are realized. So that also, there won't be an impact.
Are deal timelines coming down now?
Not really. Not at least observed this in a significant way this quarter of the deal duration coming down now.
Debangana, I think I responded to Vijay already with respect to, you know, the fact that due to uncertain environment, we will decide during the year when that's going to happen. And the quantum of it also, we will decide at that time only.
Ekta Suri from Zee Business.
Good evening, gentlemen.
Krithi, [Foreign language] so how is TCS planning to be altogether different adding more value to the business? [Foreign language] global issues [ ?
Ekta, on a deal, long-term commitment from our customers. If one way to look at it is what it is, length of duration of the deals. As we mentioned, the deal duration hasn't changed, and as you mentioned, the TCV that we signed this quarter, even without any mega deals, is probably the second highest for us, right? It's at $12.2 billion. The previous high had a significant portion of mega deals in it. We are not seeing any reduction or reduced commitment from our customer. In fact, the engagements are only stronger. And in fact it relates to your second question, because we how do we bring value to our customers through AI. That is actually what is increasing the commitment and engagement with our customers.
What each one of our business groups looking at the value chain for their customer's industry segment, looking at what are the opportunities where AI can bring them immediate value or where you can in fact disrupt the value chain, bring more sustained value. So that's what our teams go back to customer with. That's where we differentiate ourselves. We're helping them leverage the technology investment they have made and getting the business benefit, and we are very confident that we'll be able to deliver more value to them through AI.
So your question on whether the slight drop in margin was due to current macro getting impacted. As I explained earlier, it is more linked to the investments which you made, the tactical interventions which I talked about. And some part of it is on higher elevated expenses in this quarter, which was linked to either purpose-driven initiatives on CSR or higher travel or marketing-linked events. So not directly linked to anything on how the macro is turning out in the past couple of weeks. Do we see cost escalation? I think I mentioned about one part in an environment where things are uncertain. Our operating leverage gets impacted a bit because you might have to carry higher bench or the utilization gets impacted.
Ekta, [Foreign language] will do more work will deliver more work for our customers will need same or more number of people to deliver that work. So I don't see an impact on hiring because of AI.
Thank you Varun Sood from Mint.
Hi, gentlemen, sir. The first question has the BSNL deal ended in the March quarter?
Ended. It's successfully going towards completion, not yet ended. The initial contract should end in Q1.
So the second question you mentioned 94% of your international that is your international business grew 0.6% sequentially. So that means almost about 94% of your business. 6% is India. So was the slowdown in BSNL so much that your net sequential decline was almost 1%. Would that be a right way to look at the number?
Looking at it.
Just to clarify.
So we are not calling out client-specific ones, but if you do the calculations that would come to approximately that time.
Krithi, you mentioned that late February, early March was when this uncertainty started. But this quarter again, it won't reflect truly on your performance because one month's uncertainty should not really impact your overall growth in Q4 and for the fiscal year. So I am just trying to understand, is it just that the BSNL deal, the ramp downs happen and full year revenue decline is almost full? Year growth is almost the slowest in four years. Are there more such ramp downs? Is there some client should we say? The leaking bucket theory where you are losing some of your clients.
First of all, factually you are not correct. So if you look at FY24, we grew actually better than FY 2024 in FY 2025.
FY 2024 was 4.1%.
4.1%
FY 2024 was 3.4% or something. FY 2022 is 4.2%. FY 2025 is 4.2%.
FY 2025 is 3.8%.
No, no.
You are looking at dollar numbers. Probably. We are talking about the constant currency numbers. There is significant cross currency relation. We have published the CC number as well. So thank you.
Otherwise, like, if he said, if you are not taking it without BSNL, that if you add that had added to our overall growth, probably we are even with this 0.8% without being neutral, we will be in the 0.6%-0.7% kind of territory positive. There was, as I said, some amount of project deferral that happened in March. That uncertainty. So we were hoping that we will be sub-1%. I'm sorry, higher than 1% when we were in the early part of the quarter, like it came down. So but what we were primarily looking at is are all business verticals growing and all major markets growing? And that was the most important thing for us, which we are quite accepting consumer business and life sciences and healthcare and manufacturing marginally.
All other markets grew and we had growth coming in business verticals. On the whole, given the situation, we are quite comfortable where we are. I do not think, as I said, there are no significant ramp downs elsewhere and there are no significant cancellations elsewhere. We are comfortable with where we are given the overall situation.
So, two last questions considering this uncertainty, macroeconomic uncertainty. One would believe there is every likelihood that this $39.4 billion order book which you have, some of those projects may get deferred, may get delayed, and some of your current accounts, those ramp downs which are happening, God forbid, but they could also become pretty big. So when you are saying that FY 2026 will be better than FY 2025, is this more a hope or do you have a visibility that FY 2026 indeed will be better than FY 2025? Thank you,
Varun.
The only visibility is the order book, whether you want to call it hope or aspiration. It's for you to guess. I am giving you the facts that I have. The facts are my order book based on the order book. Based on the discussions I've been having with our customer, we are saying that we believe FY 2026 will be better than FY 2025 if our assumptions go wrong, then you will be right.
I do not want to, but one last question, sir. This $39.4 billion TCV, any visibility or any color which you can share that, say, 50% of this is within five years because this I would like to believe includes both your renewals and your new order. Can you share any number, say 30% or 40%, of this order book will be translated to the revenue within two or five years because it gives much better understanding how your order book is translating to revenue. Thank you,
Varun.
We will not be sharing that information. But what I can assure you is the average deal tenure weighted, the average deal tenure has not shifted significantly compared to previous quarter.
Thank you, Varun. Ashish Agashe from PTI.
So many times in this press conference. Just wanted to broadly know how do you play this and when you say that FY 20 26 will be better than FY 2025, is it the result of the 90 day breather which you have probably gotten? Or would that comment have been different had it been 48 hours before? Have we met? That's for one. And secondly, sir, has there been any change on the infra creation front as well? Last three months we have seen two announcements towards this. CapEx is also up in FY 2025. So, are you building more rather than sort of leasing? Is that a preference at the company?
Ashish, all of you mentioned uncertainty as many times as I mentioned. So I don't. The point is, my belief, right? It, in no country, no region will be, will want to live with this uncertainty for a very long period of time. Or maybe over a period of. That's what I believe. Near term, some certainty will emerge and we'll all know where this trade policy regime would take us forward. And once that, there is some sort of clarity on that, businesses take decisions whether they are towards more cost optimization, more discretionary projects, those decisions will be taken. But most important thing is some decisions will be taken. We also believe that most organizations have to go through technology transformation because they have deferred significant technology transformation for too long.
Third is our order book. So based on this is what we can commit. We believe that, when I say FY26 would be better, it's based on these factors. More importantly, like important assumption I am making is this uncertainty will be short-lived.
On the infrastructure. Okay.
Sir, why are businesses ordering at all? Like,
Ordering?
You are reporting the second-biggest number on the TCV, so why aren't they ordering at all? In the sense that, or is it so that, this number does not capture any activity in March? There was-
No, no.
Like-
It does. Like, see, I said there's no major panic that's hit the market. Some places there is a difference. But, it's not that it's all come to a stop. Like we have been winning large deals across. In fact, our North America order book also is one of the highest, I think, right?
Yes. Yes.
It's one of the highest. So customers are taking decisions towards cost optimization. There are some decisions still taken towards a discretionary spend. Like I did say there is uncertainty because there is a reduction. Maybe you can look at if without the uncertainty our order book could have been even better. That's the way I would look at it.
Thank you. See, typically in any city which we operate in, we have a balance of lease and own facility. And if you look at the two announcements which you talked about, one is currently a lease with an option to buy at a later date. And the land acquisition which you talked about is a thing where we have bought the land and we'll be building up capacity over the next three years. There's no change from an infra decision perspective.
Thank you, Ashish. Our next question from Himanshi from The Economic Times.
Sir, I want to ask about, and I know you've already answered about it, but, BFSI in the Americas, are you seeing, you know, deal momentum slowing down there? Could you elaborate a little bit? Also, Milind sir, is there a visibility on the upcoming quarters, especially the next 90 days? You know, there's a lot of uncertainty. Any, visibility on headcount growth in the upcoming quarter?
BFSI in general and particularly in North America, I still find the growth has been good in Q4 as well. Globally also what we declared, so good growth compared to most other business verticals. The deal momentum is also continuing to be robust and for us in BFSI North America.
Thanks.
Only segment where we find some softness could be insurance, but rest of it's been quite robust.
Himanshi, as I said, we will be continuing to hire from the campus and similar or a little larger number than what we had last year. That will continue. What happens next quarter, what is the net headcount increase depends on many other factors, which will be dependent on the business environment we are in right now.
Next question from Lalatendu Mishra from The Hindu.
Good evening, gentlemen. My question is about the trade war, the noisy trade war that is happening. You know, the certainty that emerged from yesterday, last night, is that 90 days of pause on 75 countries, and the trade war between America and China has intensified, the two biggest economies. As a company, how do you read it? Thank you.
Lalatendu, my job is to read what my customers tell me. I don't want to. I'm not going to read anything macro picture and then arrive at like. Our approach has always been stay close to our customers and understand what would be good for our customers in a given point in time. And so sometimes they do more cost optimization programs, sometimes they do more transformation. They want to leverage technology to provide benefit to them. So that's our approach has always been, like staying close to our customers and developing our offerings to meet the requirements. So I'm not too worried because it's not in my control, so I worry about what I can do.
So the stance remains the same?
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Next question from Urvi Malvania, from Financial Express.
Hi, good evening. Two questions, Krithi. One is you've mentioned, the mega deals order book is, the second-highest ever.
That's right. Our book is very good without any mega deals in that.
So, basically, if you can give some color on which deal segment you're seeing most traction? And if some color on how much gen AI adoption by clients is driving the order book? And second is where you're seeing the deal ramp down? You said it's not major, but then again, in what segment it's happening? Oh, and are gen AI-based deals also getting affected?
See, first on the deal segment, like, what we publish is North America, I gave you. North America is about $6.8 billion, and BFSI is $4 billion, and CBG, Retail Business Group is $1.7 billion. Okay? And all of them are quite strong compared to the historical performance. And for the things that we don't publish also, most segments had a very strong deal growth. And gen AI, as I explained, like, we have. We look at both from AI for business and AI for IT. We find strong traction and increasing traction. In AI, there are no deal cancellations coming in, AI. It is actually driving our growth, one of the key factors driving our growth and driving the order book.
Thank you.
.
Milind, one question for you. Last time also we discussed the upskilling aspect. Now, there's some margin pressure that you're seeing or anticipating given uncertainty. Do you see any that affecting the way you look at upskilling, especially with the new trainees on board?
We will never look at that, look at it that way. Miss, l ike I said, campus hiring and overall internal development of our associates, whether coming from the campus, coming from the market or basically have been here for long time, that is a strategic investment we make. You know, irrespective of the market situation and that continues.
Next question from Valerie, from Hindu BusinessLine. Okay. We'll actually move on now to Haripriya Suresh, who is joining us from Bangalore. She's joining us online. So Haripriya, you can unmute yourself and ask your question. Haripriya, can you hear us? Oh, I believe Sai is joining from Reuters instead. We just got a message from Sai. Sai, if you can hear us, can you unmute yourself and ask your question?
Yeah.
Hi. Hi. Yes, so one question to Krithi and one question to Milind. So, Krithi, you said that the uncertainty, you expect it to die down in the next few months, right? So can we assume that probably this, whatever the client issues and all is, you know, short-term and the long-term, you expect, you know, from Q3 onwards, probably after the 90 day period, you expect some sort of stability? So because it sends. My second question is related to that, because you're kind of sending mixed signals, is because you're saying FY 2026 would be better than FY 2025. So, and, there's also an added part of, you know, delayed wage hikes.
I'm sure, like, in terms of employee morale and probably in terms of attrition, that could have an effect. So can you just tell us, like, when do you see a certainty, at least like from your client's perspective? And yeah, and, in terms of the attrition, do you see it climbing up one, because of the decision on wage hikes? Thank you.
Sai, I said I expect or hope, okay, certainty to set in in probably in the short-medium term. Okay? And, I'm not... See, because this is not in my hand, right? Like, for me to comment on when there will be more certainty, because it depends on so many global factors. And the decision that we have taken on wage hike is once there is clarity. So we don't want to put a timeline on ourselves saying that when we would announce. But we said once we have a clarity, we'll announce the wage hike. Milind, you may want to add.
No, I think you kind of cleared that already. But I think the only point I will add is, you know, we continue to communicate with our people and continue to, you know, explain the overall situations. And, you know, a lot of our people basically do understand this, you know, and it has happened in the past in certain quarters and we actually got a very good response in the past as well. So, I don't expect any significant changes in attrition or anything on the workforce front because of this uncertain situation.
Thank you. We're gonna take a last question from Anjana, from The Informist.
Hi, thank you. One question is. My first question is about concerns about visa policies in the U.S. Since there are a lot of uncertainty in U.S. policies, what are your expectations? By any chance, do you have any strategy in place to deal with a possible shock if anything comes up? Particularly about H-1B visas? Second is about, we have been seeing a lot of traction in AI in Singapore, particularly AI boom in Singapore. So, your other industry peers in the U.S. like Google, Microsoft, Nvidia have also been shifting their focus to Singapore as well. So are you also planning to focus more in Singapore while also continuing to focus on U.S. operations? Thank you.
Anjana, with respect to the visa issue, you know, I think, as I said it earlier, we actually have a global model. We have workforce globally, and obviously including in the U.S., a significant workforce where we hire locally, where people obviously go on a visa from here. So while, you know, we do have, you know, visas issued this year as well, but our overall business environment is something which is, you know, the overall business model which we have, which is a global one, does not really depend on this specific factor on H-1B visas.
Thank you.
On A-
Thank you.
AI, like, see, we have a very significant presence in Singapore already. We work with partners, work with multiple clients there, and, regarding AI, we look at wherever talent's available because nowadays this is a very niche and new area where we can acquire as much talent as possible. So we are focused on wherever we can add to our talent pool, we look at it. Like, it could be Singapore definitely is one option for us. But we look at multiple regions where we can acquire AI talent.
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