How Accenture Has Emerged as a Threat to Infosys, Wipro

Shares in Infosys and Wipro jumped on Friday following Accenture's strong quarterly results and higher revenue guidance. Traders bet that Accenture's strong growth reflects rising demand for IT services, which should benefit Indian firms. (Read) But, at least two brokerages said that Accenture's growth could be coming at the cost of Indian outsourcers, particularly Infosys and Wipro, which have been facing headwinds. 1) 47 per cent of Accenture's revenues come from outsourcing, putting it in direct competition with Indian outsourcers. However, unlike its competitors, especially Infosys and Wipro, Accenture's revenue is growing at double-digit in constant currency. Accenture's growth may be coming at the cost of weaker players as the overall demand environment for IT services continues to be subdued, analysts say. 2) According to Nirmal Bang Institutional Equities, despite a larger base in outsourcing business, Accenture has been growing at more than 10 per cent on a constant currency basis for the past few quarters, indicating that it has been gaining market share against a number of India-centric players. Infosys finished 2014-15 with just 5.6 per cent growth, while Wipro clocked 7 per cent in constant currency. 3) Accenture is also growing faster than its Indian peers in the key market of US, and in verticals such as financials, healthcare and communications, where Indian IT has been a laggard, according to Nomura. The broad-based growth and the fact that large deal wins (above $100 million, 33 in fiscal year-to-date) seem to be fairly spread out indicate the problems being faced by tier-1 India-based vendors like TCS (in BFSI), Tech Mahindra (in telecom) are company-specific, said Nirmal Bang Institutional Equities. 4) Accenture has established a lead in Digital, used to describe services such as analytics, content management, social media and cloud services. Digital is the fastest-growing and high-margin vertical, and has attracted the attention of all outsourcers. As much as 90 per cent of incremental spending in the outsourcing space will come to Digital, Nirmal Bang said citing industry analysts. Accenture's lead in Digital is bad news for Indian outsourcers because spending and margins on traditional IT services (such as application development, infrastructure management, BPO), where Indian companies excelled, have been coming down. 5) Higher growth has led Accenture to hire aggressively in offshore locations. According to Nomura data, Accenture's offshore headcount rose 22 per cent in last twelve months as compared to 10 per cent rise in offshore headcount for Infosys. In India, Accenture now employs nearly 1.5 lakh employees. Higher number of employees in low-cost destinations is helping Accenture take on Indian competitors, which have 80 per cent employees in offshore destinations. Infosys and Wipro are likely to continue underperforming Accenture in the coming quarters, Nomura said.

How Accenture Has Emerged as a Threat to Infosys, Wipro

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