Good evening everyone and welcome to the first quarter earnings press conference of HCLTech. We are joined by our senior leadership, led by CVK, Shiv Walia, and Ram Sundararajan.

CVK, over to you to start proceedings.

Good evening everyone. Thank you for joining us today.

We began FY27 with a focus on growing our advanced AI-led offerings, increase our relevance with clients, and capitalize on the full range of AI-related market opportunities in pursuit of becoming the world's best AI solutions provider. Our intent is to benefit disproportionately from the AI-native and AI-amplified opportunities, which together represents the fastest-growing pool of enterprise spend, while in AI-disrupted services, we intend to innovate faster than the market to stay ahead of the deflationary curve, rather than be defined by it.

The fruition of this is reflected in our growing advanced AI revenue. Our advanced AI revenue for the quarter stood at $171 million, marking a 10.6% quarter-on-quarter increase and a 62.1% year-on-year increase.

Our annualized advanced AI revenue now stands at $688 million. Let me dwell into the business performance for the quarter.

AMJ is typically a weaker quarter for us due to planned revenue declines, driven by productivity commitments in certain large managed services contracts. Despite this seasonal headwinds, we delivered a good all-around performance.

Our revenue declined by 0.5% sequentially and increased by 2.6% on a year-on-year basis in constant currency. Our operating margin stood at 16.9%, an improvement of 40 basis points quarter-on-quarter and 56 basis points year-on-year.

All growth rates referred to here are in constant currency. Our services business grew 3.5% year-on-year and declined by 0.7% sequentially.

Our IT and business services grew 4.2% year-on-year and remained flat sequentially. Our engineering and R&D services grew 0.3% year-on-year and declined 3.7% sequentially.

HCL Software annual recurring revenue now stands at $1.063 billion, a 2% increase year-on-year in constant currency. Revenue grew 2.2% sequentially while declining 5.3% year-on-year.

Recently, we've completed the acquisition of Jaspersoft. This adds the visualization layer to our data management portfolio.

What was missing was the visualize layer, the capability that takes governed, trusted data and delivers it as actionable insight to business users who need it. From bookings perspective, the quarter was very good.

It was well balanced across verticals, segments, and geographies. Our net new booking for the quarter was $2.4 billion.

This is our highest-ever Q1 booking till date. Of course, this $2.4 billion excludes the recent mega deal which was signed in early July and so not part of Q1 booking.

We were selected by a Europe-headquartered Fortune Global 50 firm as the technology partner to accelerate AI-led transformation and management of their global digital workplace and enterprise networks. On the people front, we are 223,889 people as of 30th June 2026, which is a net decrease of 3,292 compared to the previous quarter.

Our attrition stands at 12.7% on LTM basis. Our AI strategy execution is showing up in a 3.3% year-on-year increase in revenue per employee, which has gone up every quarter for the last five quarters.

With respect to our AI updates, as our AI strategy is anchored on five strategic pillars. On each of these pillars—proactive transformation of our services, building differentiated IP, expanding AI-led services, scaling AI partnerships, and developing AI talent—our progress has been very impressive, and you would find several evidence of this in our investor release.

I also want to spend a minute to comment on a recent strategic investment of $151 million in Sarvam, India's full-stack sovereign AI company. This investment reinforces HCLTech's position as an AI innovator, not just an adapter, underscoring our commitment to building, co-innovating, and shaping the next wave of AI.

By combining Sarvam's research depth with HCLTech's global enterprise relationships, our engineering expertise, and software IP, we are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform spanning models, platforms, applications, and managed services. This meaningfully opens up the Indian sovereign AI market for us across industries and government sector.

While the world's attention has been captured by the ever-larger general purpose models, the real value for enterprises often lies in smaller specialized models trained deeply on the language, data, and workflows of a single industry or a client. These models are faster, more cost-efficient, and more accurate where it matters, and the window to establish leadership here is open now.

I would also like to share an important strategic initiative of HCLTech, full-stack AI offering powered by AI data centers. Global data center demand is set to nearly triple by 2030 thanks to AI, and in India, that growth is expected to happen at an even faster rate.

Sovereign data requirements are increasingly mandating that workloads for governments, enterprises, and even global consumer platforms be delivered in-country. The business is shifting from physical infrastructure to higher-value AI-ready full-stack solutions, one we believe will be a new growth vector for HCLTech.

We will combine our capabilities across AI data center design, DevOps, and cloud operations, as well as our software portfolio with the new AI data center business for this. In this regard, we will make a strategic investment up to ₹3,500 crores and with the potential to scale to 50 megawatt of capacity.

Next topic is our pipeline and market trends. Pipeline remains healthy.

Looking at the broader market, on one side, we are seeing strong sustained growth in both AI-native and AI-amplified services. On the other side, where AI-disrupted services, which is the more traditional commoditized work, continues to be optimized further as AI-enabled automation takes hold.

We are well positioned to grow our business further through very clear strategies to address each of these three segments. Looking ahead, we are retaining our FY27 guidance of 1% to 4% at a company level revenue growth and 1.5% to 4.5% for services, both in constant currency.

Margin guidance is also retained at 17.5% to 18.5%. For clarity, this guidance is for organic growth and does not include acquisitions, including the recently concluded Jaspersoft acquisition.

With this, I will now request Shiv to share more details on our financial performance.

Thank you, CVK. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q1 financial year '27 earnings call.

I will begin with our with an overview of our financial performance for the quarter, starting with the revenue performance. Total revenue for the quarter for the quarter is ₹34,579 crores, which is up 1.8% quarter-on-quarter and 13.9% year-on-year.

Services revenue is at ₹31,748 crores, growing 1.7% quarter-on-quarter and 14.9% year-on-year. Software revenue was at ₹2,960 crores, which is up 3.6% quarter-on-quarter and 4.7% year-on-year.

In terms of profitability, our EBIT came in at ₹5,831 crores, representing 16.9% of revenue, and this reflects growth of 3.8% quarter-on-quarter and 18% year-on-year. Net income came in at ₹4,624 crores at 13.4% of revenue, up 3% quarter-on-quarter and 20.3% year-on-year.

In terms of update on return on invested capital, ROIC, our ROIC continues to improve, supported by our focus on profitability and efficient capital management. Company company-level ROIC for the last 12 months is at 40.7%, up 257 basis points year-on-year.

Services ROIC is at 47.8%, up 260 basis points year-on-year. HCL Software ROIC is at 21.6%, up 75 basis points year-on-year.

Now an update on cash generation and balance sheet. Our cash generation remained healthy.

Over the last 12 months, free cash flow was at ₹17,843 crores, and operating cash flow was at ₹19,258 crores. The balance sheet remained strong, with gross cash at ₹27,058 crores, and net cash as of of ₹26,907 crores as of 30th of June 2026.

Operating cash flow to net income net income conversion was at 107%, while free cash flow to net income conversion was at 99% for the last 12 months. Our total DSO, including unbilled receivables, was at 86 days, an increase of 2 days quarter-on-quarter.

Now moving on to shareholder returns. Our normalized diluted EPS for the last 12 months was at ₹66.99, up ₹4.5% quarter-on-quarter and 6.9% year-on-year.

Including the one-time impact of new labor codes, diluted EPS was at ₹64.25. The board has declared an interim dividend of ₹12 share 12 per share for the quarter.

The record date is 17th of July '26, and the payment date shall be 27th of July 2026. This brings the last 12 months payout to ₹60 per share, effectively distributing 93.2% of our net income.

That concludes my update. I would now like to hand over to Ram for an update on HR matters.

Over to you, Ram. Thank you.

Good evening everybody. I think CVK has already called out the closing head count and attrition.

I'll probably not try and repeat that. You need to look at the quarter-ending head count in line with the revenues.

You will see the productivity improvement. Revenue per employee has improved.

We added 1,056 freshers this quarter. That again is in line with the plan for Q1, which again usually is a soft quarter, everything gets reflected accordingly.

Attrition, again if you see, it's pretty stable now for good 10 quarters. If you see here, for the last 10 quarters, attrition is stable at 12.7%.

I probably will stop there and maybe we will open the floor for questions.

Please identify yourself.

Hi, good evening. This is Subhayan Chakraborty from The Economic Times.

I would just move to the very interesting announcement that you made with regards to the 3,500 crore, the 3,500 crore being moved to this new data center business. If you could just give a little bit of color as to what the financing aspects of that would be, and if you are partnering with some of the established players?

This is a AI data center investment which we will make. Obviously, we are in conversation with several clients and we are very close to establishing our first client with some committed capacity.

We're starting with the initial investment of ₹3,500 crores, but our bigger vision is to grow it to a 50 megawatt. The most important element here is while it is AI data center business, we are playing fundamentally a different game.

Normally, you look at this data center capacity in megawatts and gigawatts, and that becomes the product, right? Megawatt and gigawatt becomes the product, and that's for infrastructure companies.

For us, the megawatt is just the anchor. Our whole value is in delivering full-stack AI services, which means it's data center, it's the GPUs, it's the models, it's the applications that we will deliver on top of it.

The overall value creation is significantly of a very different magnitude when you really look at this as a full stack, and that's really what we want to play. We are also looking at leveraging the data center that we are building for delivering managed services and outcome-based contracts for global clients because today token costs are a very important component of the overall delivery.

We having our own capacity and our own models and solutions to deliver managed services and fixed-price contracts is another very big advantage for global clients.

Hi, I'm Shashank from Outlook Business. HCLTech is one of the first IT services companies in India who have invested in a native foundational LLM company like Sarvam.

My question is, how do you plan to monetize this investment? Are you planning to go to general purpose model collaboratively with Sarvam, or you're planning to go towards the enterprise AI solutions?

I think, as I said, there are four significant opportunities. First and foremost is the opportunities in India, both in the enterprises and in the governments, both state and central, and public sector undertakings.

That's a big opportunity. Each of these large entities are looking at leveraging AI in a very meaningful way to really transform their businesses, specially in the financial services, insurance, and these kind of verticals.

While Sarvam will provide the models and the full-stack capability, we will be the system integrators. We think there is a good opportunity there, both with the government and enterprises.

Globally, today the entire AI space is evolving with two broad principles. One is a zero trust kind of a principle, where no data leaves any enterprise for either data transfer, prompting, reasoning.

The data remains within the enterprise, the zero trust model. It is also going to be a tiered model.

Tier 1 will be a model which could be an SLM, which is within your enterprise, which can be used to train your own enterprise. Data can be used to train the model, which can do most of the work that you want to do within your enterprise, and only go to a frontier model on things which really need.

That's a Tier 2. I think it's a hybrid tiered approach, that's what is going to happen in the global enterprises.

Here, having a partnership with a foundational model firm will help us. We have enterprise relationships globally and we have very deep engineering capability and a lot of software products.

This along with Sarvam will become an excellent solution for global markets. Some countries will also be looking at creating their own sovereign AI, we can kind of do this together with Sarvam.

These are the four opportunities we are looking at.

Good evening, gentlemen. I'm Shakshi Jain from Informist Media.

One question for Mr. Vijayakumar.

If you could offer some commentary on demand across segments as well as geographies, if there was any impact of the West Asia war seen in Q1 and how do you see things going forward? Also you did mention the company aims to stay ahead of the AI deflationary curve.

If you could elaborate on that. One question for Mr.

Sundararajan as well. If you could give us some insight into the company's lateral hiring strategy for FY27.

Last quarter you mentioned fresher hiring numbers would be similar to FY26. Now in this other segment, right, mid and senior talent pool, if you plan to exit FY27 with a net addition in head count?

Also, FDEs, what is the number currently? How do you plan to end FY '27?

One for Mr. Walia.

With the recent acquisitions of the company, right, can we expect an increase in the D&A to revenue ratio of the company? It's been around 3.5%, give or take a few basis points.

Can we expect an increase on that front going forward?

Okay. Let's address one by one.

You talked about the demand environment. I think you should look at our booking, $2.4 billion this quarter, is the highest-ever booking in Q1.

That's definitely a very positive indicator. We continue to have a similar size of qualified pipeline as we had in the beginning of last quarter.

Pipeline continues to remain robust. Of course, there has been some impact due to West Asia.

We did talk about it in the last quarter, it started in March and some of that is continuing. Some of the discretionary spend softness continues to be there.

We see a large pipeline, very healthy booking. We've already announced a mega deal.

We expect a strong booking even in Q2. I think overall I feel quite positive about the overall outlook.

Then, pass it to Ram. I think,

yeah, your question was about the talent. Far as our hiring plan is concerned, I think it's going to be in line with the revenue guidance.

If we split that into what we do for fresher hiring versus lateral hiring, and I think you had a specific question about FDEs. Fresher hiring, as I said, it'll pretty much follow the trend that we had for last year.

I think for a couple of years now, we've moved away from trying to commit to an annual number and instead create a rolling quarterly plan, and that's what we will stay with. In aggregate, at the end of the year, this year would be similar to what we did last year.

Our focus again is going to be not so much on numbers. If I have to compromise on numbers and if that results in increasing the percentage elite engineers that we will hire, that will be our focus, right?

The reason why we do that, it's exactly for the point that you made, which means these elite engineers over the next two to three years should become part of the FDE cohort. That's the plan.

As far as lateral hiring is concerned, it's always need-based. We don't go in with a fixed plan for a quarter, or for that matter even a month.

It's going to be need-based. Again, it will just follow the revenue projection for each quarters, what capacity we have, what's the utilization, and what we need to build.

That's the approach that we have always taken and that'll continue. Specifically recruiting for FDEs, it'll be a mix of both build and buy, right?

If we have to go for a talent buy, it's got to be more opportunistic for immediate needs. Otherwise, it's going to be on the back of the investments that we are making for building the talent internally, right?

We do have a target in place in terms of how we build FDEs internally. Every delivery unit will have FDEs built, and we are making investments for that.

We have been talking about the skilling investments for the last six quarters now. All of that will add up to how we build FDEs.

On your question regarding D&A going up, yes, it will go up compared to what we have right now because with any acquisition, all the amortization it's going to be there in the P&L for initial couple of years. That's what we expect to happen.

When you say it will go up, by how many basis points?

I have not done the exact maths, in the sense we are still in the process of doing the purchase price allocation accounting for this. I don't expect this to go up significantly.

All right. Okay.

Thank you.

One more, okay.

Hi. Just going back to the Sarvam investment for just one moment.

I was just wondering, are you, sir, talking about offering Sarvam models to your clients as part of the new AI stack that you're talking about?

I think it will be very dependent on what the client requirements are, but that's a possibility.

Okay.

Now we'll take questions. Oh, you have, okay.

Yeah.

Hi. I'm Rishabh with NDTV Profit.

Just a couple of questions. Telecom discretionary spending the weakness was expected throughout the calendar year.

Have spending trends improved in the first quarter? What have you seen on that front?

Secondly, did the manufacturing and retail clients, those budget cuts, did they continue in Q1? Do you have any visibility on that?

Also, are procurement delays and slower decision-making, are they still impacting deal closures? These three.

Thanks.

Yeah. Sorry, what was the first,

telecom?

Telecom, right? Telecom.

Telecom, as we had called out last time, there is certainly a reduction in the discretionary spending, and that continues. We don't see the situation improved in the last three months.

Retail and consumer business, I think our retail and consumer business is doing very well. It's grown 10% year-on-year.

This quarter we've grown 5% on the back of we had announced a very large win two two quarters ago with the large global retail apparel company. That client has ramped up fully.

We've executed that well, and that's causing the good growth in revenue. Manufacturing has some challenges due to different reasons, and some like automotive and all are under stress.

That situation, I don't think is changed, even though we won some good engineering services opportunities in the automotive sector as well.

Thank you.

Now we'll take questions from media who've joined us virtually.

Sorry?

People who've joined us virtually, we'll take questions from them. Over to you, Nitin.

Thank you, Ashutosh. For our friends who have joined us virtually today, please follow these instructions to ask a question.

For people joining on the Webex mobile app, tap the three dots on the floating panel and select the raise hand icon. For people joining on the desktop app, please click the raise hand icon at the bottom right of the participant panel.

For people joining as audio-only participant, please press *3 to raise your hand. Our first question, gentlemen, is from Jas from The Mint.

Jas, please go ahead and ask your question.

Am I audible?

Yes, you are, loud and clear. Please go ahead.

I just want to understand that when a peer in the past, I think somewhere in October last year, made this foray into data center, in an interview you had mentioned that entering into the data center space was not on the cards. What explains this change?

Second related question, when you say that the GPU, applications, and models will be yours, that you'll be building layers on top of what you'll have to offer, could you elaborate a little on that? How you'll be going about some of this work?

Third question, Chief, if I look at the revenue from the top five clients, that has declined 4% sequentially. This softness, do you see, is it more than what you had previously baked in?

If you can also throw some light on the demand scenario in and around this, that would be helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. The first question, it's a fair question.

I think we said data centers are asset-heavy and we were not looking at it. We are not really departing from our core business model of remaining asset-light.

We see this as a logical extension. AI has made compute and data center capacity very scarce, and data center capacity and compute has become the strategic bottleneck in the entire value chain.

Owning a foothold there will allow us to sell the full stack of what we believe is a higher-margin services with sovereign assurance to both enterprise clients and governments. In other words, we are making a targeted asset-heavy move precisely to grow an asset-light services engine in the AI era.

Of course, we continue to evaluate what are the right opportunities and how do we continue to expand our AI business, and this decision was as a part of that. The second question was Five

top five customers.

Yes, sorry. The top five customers has declined because of one client where there is a year-on-year reduction because it's a large transaction that we did, after the first year, second year there is a reduction, and that one client is kind of significantly kind of impacted the top five.

If you want to take as a broader sense, it was in line with what we expected, nothing unusual.

Our next question is from Poulomi from The Financial Express. Poulomi, please go ahead and ask your question.

Poulomi, are you able to hear us? We'll take our next question.

Hi, am I audible?

Hi. Yes, you are now.

Please go ahead.

Good evening. You've mentioned a strong deal pipeline, but I'm just trying to understand what is the percentage of AI-led deflation that you're seeing on traditional revenue?

Also what is the reason for the dip in head count and slowed fresher hiring as well? Do you have a target in mind for your fresher intake for the year?

AI deflation, we had called out we expect for our portfolio, we expect it to be 2% to 3% is the AI deflation. Of course, in spite of AI deflation, our guidance is 1% to 4%, which means we are growing much more to offset the AI deflation to still deliver a net growth.

Drop in head count is a part of our overall business. We hire based on demand, and we continue to evolve as an AI solutions company, which means the IP components and the automation and AI infusion in all our service delivery makes it easier for us to deliver the same work with slightly lesser number of people.

If you see the last five quarters, our revenue per employee has gone up every quarter, so that's really part of our overall business model.

Got it. Do you have a target in mind for the revenue per employee since you've mentioned it?

We don't have a target, but we expect to grow it gradually.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you, Poulomi. Our next question is from Rukmini from The Fortune.

Rukmini, please go ahead and ask your question.

CVK, evening. Two questions on strategy and two on numbers.

One, the Sarvam investment, if we look at the India share of business, about 3%, and you seem to be bullish on India business growing. Given the nature of businesses out of India, the margins, etc., the share of revenue from India business, is there some number that you can share on how big this is likely to grow because of Sarvam?

Two, on this data center business that you're talking about, CVK, if it's AI-optimized, should be about a billion dollar for this 50 megawatt, right? Some sense of understanding on what kind of partnerships, will there be some equity partner stepping in, and investments that is going to be tied up?

Perhaps once you answer, I'll ask the second set of questions. Thank you.

India business, as we mentioned, the AI opportunity in India is at least $20 billion and it is growing fast. While it is still a small part of our revenue, over the last year or so, we've been significantly enhancing our focus on India market.

We plan to strengthen our India presence and also really lead with AI-native solutions in the Indian market, and that kind of builds the entire strategic rationale as well for our investments in a firm like Sarvam. Data center business, there are multiple ways of this business.

One is pure physical infrastructure or really a co-location kind of service, but the second one, you could be really providing compute and co-location, and the third is you can offer the models and the applications on top of it. We are going to play the full stack.

We have obviously data center, we are going to build compute, GPU infrastructure. We will build embed models and a lot of applications with both enterprises and government.

Another very important use of these data centers will be to use for our managed services contracts with global clients and our fixed-price or outcome-based contracts with clients. We can continue to consume our own capacity and deliver them much more cost-effectively for our clients.

In terms of the partnerships, in terms of the clients, in terms of very specific investment plan, we will share it as we progress. Our initial business plan is to invest about ₹3,500 crores.

This will be a combination of debt and equity, and there could be other partners who will contribute to this as well, which we will announce in due course.

Got it. CVK, on numbers, the outsourcing cost, even on a year-on-year basis and sequentially, has gone up.

Some color on that. Two, also Sure.

Yeah.

It has gone up, but you would have seen there's some reduction in the employees' cost, it's just compensating. We do use outsourcing cost to ramp up the execution part.

It's normal in our business to have this, both the cost, employee cost versus outsourcing cost playing together.

The softness in the ER&D services business vis-à-vis the AI story, just want to understand what is happening in that bit if we are so bullish on the entire AI piece?

We had talked about discretionary spending being soft, and that directly plays into our ERS business because we report it as a separate horizontal segment, you see that a little more visible in our engineering services. It's very dependent, once discretionary spending picks up, ERS will be one of the top growth drivers for us.

Thank you. Thank you, CVK.

Our next question is from Rishabh Shah from Moneycontrol. Rishabh, please go ahead and ask your question.

Hi. Congratulations gentlemen on beating estimates in a weak quarter.

Two questions, CVK. TCS, one of your large peers, recently said that AI revenue tends to be lumpy because many AI engagements last only for a quarter or two.

Is that also what you are seeing at HCLTech? How are you working to make AI revenues more recurring or sticky over time?

Second, CVK, could you please shed some light on how much of your deal today is outcome-based as it becomes more relevant in the age of AI and token pricing? Thanks.

Yeah. Our classification of advanced AI revenue has AI factory, physical AI, our IPs, which are on a annual recurring revenue model, and semiconductor for inferencing and things like that.

It has got a good mix of annuity revenue and some project revenues. Annuity revenue would be like AI data centers, and then some of the recurring revenue that we get on software products, which are AI products like AI Force and other aspects, they will be recurring.

Of course, there will be operating model transformation, there would be agentic AI implementation, they could be projects. It's a combination of both.

Overall, this portfolio looks very healthy for us. It's growing, it has grown 60% plus year-on-year, and our overall aspiration is to grow 30% year-on-year on this business.

Sorry, could you repeat your second question?

If you could shed some light on how much of your deal today are outcome-based?

There are two dimensions. One is time and material and then output-based, and the way we look at it, it has both outcome and output.

I think the last reported numbers were about 50-50, and within that, exactly what is outcome-based, we're not calling that out externally at this point.

Thank you, gentlemen. CVK.

Our next question is from Padmini from The New Indian Express. Padmini, please ask your question.

Hi, good evening. Am I audible?

Yes, you are. Please go ahead.

Several announced deals involve AI factories, GPU infrastructure, right? How are margins on these engagements compared to traditional applications and infrastructure services?

Revenue per employee reached record high, and while your head count declined, how much of this improvement is driven by AI productivity versus workforce optimization? Third, you maintained your full-year revenue guidance despite record bookings, what are the assumptions behind maintaining the current guidance rather than being more optimistic?

Okay. AI factory margins, we don't call out such a granular level of details, but being completely new services with very niche capabilities, it's only logical to get much higher margins on this AI factory services than the traditional business.

The second question is revenue per employee and the impact on AI. I think it'll be very difficult to call out the exact reasons, but as you can see that our AI-led propositions, our AI Force, our entire automation and AI infusion in all our service delivery is really getting strengthened with the capabilities that we have.

You should logically assume large part of this is driven by productivity that we are getting with the use of AI in managed services contract. That could be some things which could be related to other aspects as well.

The third element was assumptions behind the full-year guidance. We continue to maintain the same guidance as what we shared in the beginning of the year.

We've delivered a good quarter and our bookings are strong. Right now, our assumption is rest of the year will play out the way we expected, and that's why we have maintained the guidance.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question is from Anas from The Morning Context.

Anas, please go ahead and ask your question. Anas, can you hear us?

Yes. Hi, am I audible?

Yes, you are. Please go ahead.

I wanted to ask, can you quantify the productivity commitments you are now making to clients when large contracts, for example, come up for renewal? On a typical renewal, what percentage reduction in overall project value are you seeing because of AI-driven productivity?

Basically the productivity giveback that you're seeing. What is the kind of percentage that you're seeing over there?

Are you basically giving a full pass-through or are you taking some of that into your margins?

It's very very different for different kind of services. For software development, it will be 35% to 40% productivity.

For infrastructure operations, it could be 5%, 10%, or 12% efficiency. In BPO operations, depending on the work, it could vary anywhere from 25% to 40% improvement over a three-year or five-year period.

It's very dependent on exact quality of work or nature of work.

Are you taking the full productivity or are you passing on to the clients? Are you taking any margin out of it?

We're really not wanting to comment on that, but obviously we have long-term relationship with clients and there is a lot of dependency on the clients as well, it is very situational.

Thank you.

Thank you, CVK. Our last question is from Debangana from Moneycontrol.

Debangana, please ask your question.

Hello, am I audible?

Yes, you are.

Yes. Hi.

I just have a couple of questions. First to CVK.

Your India business has been growing faster than other geographies. Wanted to understand what's driving this growth.

Now that you are also venturing into sovereign AI and building capabilities around that, how do you see the India revenue contribution sort of grow in the coming quarters or maybe the next couple of years? My second question is for Ram.

Want to get a sense of, since the company completed its restructuring, I think in FY26, so as of now, how does the workforce mix look like? Because I think TCS was talking about having equal number of AI agents and employees together working.

How is the workforce mix at the moment changing at HCLTech?

Maybe let me comment on India business growth. Obviously, we are focusing on India, this business is growing nicely.

This quarter there is also a technicality which caused the India business revenues to be much higher, which maybe Shiv can explain.

As we report the geographies based revenue based on the customer location, to the billing we do to the customer locations, and one of our global customer consolidated the billing and moved that billing to the GCC center there in India. That caused increase in India revenue this quarter.

Nothing extraordinary to that extent. It's business as usual within the revenue for this.

I think the workforce mix, it's probably too early to comment on how the agents and humans mix keep shifting, but it's reasonable to assume that as we leverage more of AI and we use more agents, the number of agents deployed in our work environment will increase, and that shows up in the productivity and hence the revenue per employee. As you see that trend move up north, you will know that the mix of humans and agents are shifting, and you will see more and more agents in the mix.

Just had one last question adding to what you had mentioned, CVK, about the West Asia war impact. Want to get a sense of how are the conversations shaping in West Asia?

Are there delays in sales? Because your peers have already mentioned about that, Accenture, TCS.

How is HCLTech assessing that?

Our exposure to Middle East is very, very small. It's sub-half a percent is our Middle East exposure.

We did call out some impact of this in the broader client portfolio in March, and probably some of that sentiments continue. I will leave it there.

With that, we'll close the press conference. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you,

gentlemen.