Dear Stakeholder,
I write this letter with a sense of pride about how well your Company performed this year, not just in financial terms, but also in terms of what we accomplished for customers, employees, shareholders and communities across the world.
Your Company crossed two important milestones in FY 2019.
Its annual revenue crossed the $20 billion figure, a 20-fold increase over the last 16 years. It also became the first Indian company to achieve a market capitalization of $100 billion in the last decade, and join the list of the Top 100 most valuable companies in the world. In my opinion, this market valuation is the outcome of a better appreciation of TCS’ differentiated strategy, market success, capital allocation policy and most importantly, belief in your Company’s ability to sustain its superior revenue growth and profitability in the longer term.
Brands take a long time to build, and are an outcome of how we conduct ourselves with our stakeholders. Our values guide us in everything we do, and are core to the reputation for trust and integrity that we have built up over the decades. In FY 2019, your Company was named the fastest growing brand of the decade in IT services, and ranked among the top 3 IT services brands globally by brand value, in an independent brand value assessment.
At a time when the world is wrestling with problems like climate change and socioeconomic inequities, corporations can and should play their part in shaping favorable outcomes. Sustainability, for us, has always been the entrepreneurial pursuit of economic opportunities while aligning the interests of the organization with those of all our stakeholders. Of course, one key enabler is the unique ownership structure which ensures that much of the shareholder value that TCS creates, automatically flows back to civic society through the sterling work undertaken by the various Tata trusts.
In addition, your Company has been a force of good in communities across the world, investing in building digital talent, reducing the digital divide and resultant inequities, creating well-paying jobs that boost local economies, promoting health and wellness, and advocating responsible environmental stewardship. Your Company’s structured corporate social responsibility initiatives offer volunteering opportunities to employees, helping them give back to their local communities and imbuing them with a higher sense of purpose.
Globally, geopolitical events threaten to drag down major economies and disrupt global trade and commerce. At times like this, it is more important than ever, to stay close to the customer.
In the last downturn, TCS’ customer centric philosophy and modular organization structure allowed it to work closely with customers, and be agile in responding to their needs and reacting to events on the ground. Today, thanks to the differentiated capabilities that your Company steadily invested in building up over the last decade, and the innovative, business-centric solutions it is called upon by its customers to provide today, it is even more deeply embedded in their businesses, and is central to their growth and transformation initiatives. These deep relationships, the broad and diversified global footprint, spanning all major markets and industries, and its robust financials makes your Company’s business very resilient and well positioned to weather any storms ahead.
For a business that has navigated technology change over the last five decades, the ups and downs of short term economic cycles become insignificant blips in the broader sweep of history.
Your Company has shown itself to be immensely entrepreneurial, agile, adaptive and innovative over the years, and these attributes will continue to serve it well in the years ahead.
As enterprises become more technology-defined, they need more than ever before, a partner like TCS, who understands their business very well and can bring to bear the power of new technologies to craft innovative solutions that give them the differentiation they need to thrive in a Business 4.0 world.
The opportunities ahead are huge. By staying true to its mission and its values, and by continually investing in building newer capabilities, your Company is positioned well to become the foremost partner of choice to all forward thinking enterprises in their growth and transformation journeys.
On behalf of the Board of Directors of Tata Consultancy Services, I want to thank you for your continued trust, confidence, and support.
Warm regards,
N Chandrasekaran
Chairman
