TCS Board Approves Rs 18,000 Crore Share Buyback Program

The country's largest software services firm had logged a net profit of Rs 8,701?crore in the year-ago period.

Revenue of the Mumbai-based firm grew 16.3 per cent in the quarter under review to Rs 48,885 crore from Rs 42,015?crore in the corresponding period last fiscal, TCS said in a regulatory filing.

The board has recommended a shares buyback of Rs 18,000 crore at Rs 4,500 apiece, it added.

"Our continued growth momentum is a validation of our collaborative, inside-out approach to our customers' business transformation needs. Customers love our engagement model, our end-to-end capability, and our can-do approach to problem-solving.

"While mapping out their innovation and growth journeys, we are also helping them execute new-age operating model transformations to support those journeys," TCS CEO and?Managing Director?Rajesh Gopinathan said.

The company has also announced a dividend of Rs 7 per share with the record date being set as January 20, 2022, and the payment date as of February 07, 2022.

N Ganapathy Subramaniam, chief operating officer and executive director of TCS, said the company has crossed an important milestone of hitting the USD 25-billion revenue mark in the calendar year 2021.

TCS Chief Financial Officer Samir Seksaria said, "Our sustained investment in talent has helped us power strong growth despite a challenging supply environment. We remain focused on long-term talent development as well as on tactical measures to mitigate the talent churn."

Seksaria added that the company has exercised various operating levers in the third quarter to mitigate the higher costs and manage its employee expenses.

The company added 28,238 employees on a net basis, taking the total number of employees to 5,56,986 as on December 31, 2021.

Its IT services attrition rate (LTM) in the third quarter stood at 15.3 per cent.

TCS Chief HR Officer Milind Lakkad said, "In addition to the 43,000 freshers we hired in H1, we onboarded 34,000 fresh graduates in Q3 — which is higher than our full-year fresher hiring numbers in prior years."

Lakkad added that the company has been able to retain its best talent and overcome supply-side challenges, "by continuing to invest in our people, giving preference to internal candidates for the most exciting open positions, providing global deployment opportunities, fast track career paths linked to learning, and promotions to over 110,000 employees".