Cognizant's guidance sparks fear; Infosys, TCS fall 2-3%

Even a weak rupee have not been able to save technology stocks from sharp selling in trade today. Shares of Infosys , TCS , Wipro , HCL Tech and Tech Mahindra fell 2-3 percent intraday on Wednesday as Cognizant’s lowering its guidance sparked fears about a growth slowdown of the entire sector.

The Nasdaq-listed IT firm slashed its growth guidance for the full year from 16.5 percent to 14 percent. Higher IT spending in North America and Europe helped the company clock 16.5 percent rise in quarterly revenue and net income rose to USD 371.9 million from USD 300.4 million, a year ago.

R Chandrasekaran, executive vice chairman of Cognizant had clarified the reduced guidance is on the back of specific and certain client situations.

“We are quite disappointed that we had to reduce the guidance but the reason for that is very specific to certain client situations. Two reasons, one is, a few client situations where we saw some weakness, the demand really came out as we had expected, that is one. Second is, certain large transformational deals took more time than what we had originally anticipated to be awarded to Cognizant. We remain optimistic about the future,” he said in an interview to CNBC-TV18.

Meanwhile, on an optimistic note TCS CEO N Chandrasekaran firmly believes that the market is quite strong, customers are spending money, technology adoption is on the increase especially the US and European markets are doing well. “So I do believe that the industry and the broader market will continue to do well. There may be individual specific issues from time to time,” he said.

He expects the industry and the broader market to continue to do well and is pining hopes that that the Modi government will adopt technology in a big way. Though he doesn’t expect immediate ramp up - in the next quarter or two – he says over the next four or six quarters, technology adoption in India will pick up and it is going to be a very buoyant market again for IT companies.

Infosys Technologies Limited

TATA Consultancy Services ( TCS )