New plan to make Infy 'more relevant' to clients: Kamath

With Infosys finding it difficult to retain its benchmark status in the IT industry, its Chairman Mr K V Kamath today said the company’s new strategy will help it become "more relevant" to clients and drive superior growth in future.

“We have announced our new growth strategy — Infosys 3.0 — to address those challenges and enable us to achieve high quality industry-leading growth,” Mr Kamath told shareholders in his maiden address at Infosys’ 31st Annual General Body Meeting here. He took over as Chairman from Infosys founder N R Naryanamurthy in August last year.

In April, Infosys posted 27.4 per cent rise in Q4 profit but could not meet its own revenue estimates for the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2012. It also gave a lower-than-expected revenue growth guidance of 8-10 per cent for full year that was below Nasscom’s 11-14 per cent estimate for Indian software services industry in FY’13.

Mr Kamath said Infosys continued to make focused investments in its organisational capabilities, but at the same time it must align its offerings more closely to the business priorities of its clients.

“With that broad objective in mind, we have regrouped our service offerings under four heads namely Financial Services and Insurance; Manufacturing; Energy, Utilities, Communications and Services and Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, Logistics and Life Sciences. I am confident that this new strategy will help the company in becoming more relevant to clients and help in driving superior growth in future,” he said.

Mr Kamath also said that the IT services industry is facing twin challenges of commoditisation and scalability.

The demand was shifting from traditional horizontal offerings to industry-specific high-value offerings, he said.

Clients were looking for transformation partners to help them reduce their capex, to increase their return on investment, he added.

Mr Kamath announced a final dividend of Rs 22 per share and a special dividend of Rs 10 per share on account of the 10th year of operations of subsidiary company Infosys BPO Limited.