Cognizant beats street, guides 20% rev growth for 2010

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Q: What is your assessment of the operating environment? Have things stabilized across the geographies that you operate in, have verticals bounced back and has pricing pressure also reduced considerably?

A: I would say that we have seen broad based growth across geographies and across our vertical industries, and that is a reflection of the stabilization of the economies around the world.

But I would also say that there remains some considerable amount of debate about the shape of the economic recovery and the so called new normal or long-term growth rates of key economies around the world. If there is one broad factor that is playing on our clients' minds, it is what is the long-term growth rates of the key economies around the world.

As far as specific industries are concerned, we saw strong growth in 2009 in our healthcare business, in our retail manufacturing and logistics business. Financial services in 2009 for obvious reasons grew but didn't grow quite as fast as the rest of our other industry verticals, although we are now starting to see even financial services starting to come back and make discretionary investments.

Q: You have added nearly 10,300 employees at a time when hiring was not particularly in fashion I would say. What is your own outlook on hiring this year and how have you managed to take on so many on board?

A: This is one of the things that we are most excited about. We hired more than 10,000 people in Q4 and more than 16,000 for the full year of 2009. This is part of our philosophy of investing in the business, investing in our talent.

We think there is a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace right now to bring some talented people into the company and in the end we are a business that is all about our people. So we are very excited about welcoming people to Cognizant and we will need this group of people as we look forward to 2010.

And our revenue guidance of at least 20% is going to require us to have the talent necessary to serve that demand. So we welcome the people and we are looking forward to a good growth year for 2010.

Q: Any wage hikes that you have factored-in in the numbers going forward in terms of the coming quarter?

A: We have announced to our employees that we will do a wage increase in 2010. We are still working through the details of the magnitude of that and so on and so forth. But we do expect that there will be wage inflation and as a result wage increases for our employees across the board in 2010.