On the back of strong sales growth of 21 per cent, the company's net profit shot up 34.13 per cent to Rs 46.05 crore from Rs 34 crore in the previous year. Sales turnover moved up from Rs 324.26 crore to Rs 392.78 crore.

Gross profit before depreciation and taxes increased by 29 per cent during the year to Rs 67.40 crore with the other income component contributing Rs 8.21 crore as against Rs 6.31 crore in the las year.

The company provided depreciation on all its assets except leasehold land and improvement on an accelerated basis and accordingly, the provision for depreciation in the current fiscal was higher by Rs 1.54 crore to Rs 13.84 crore. Reserves have also gone up by 35.4 per cent to Rs 144.16 crore, during the period under review.

The company has initiated its Y2K compliance programme to address allareas of businesses and hopes to complete the project by September 30. The cost of the project, both in terms of capital and revenue expenditure is estimated at Rs 3.5 crore.

Tata Infotech had launched a number of new products during the year under review. One of these, CallMail, aimed at internet service providers and corporates has met with success. Also, its systems integration division has bagged some major projects in India, Europe and USA. The company is increasingly focussing on the export market.

The manufacturing division of the company designs and devlops microprocessor based products, electromechanical products and contract manufacturing. This division supplied document processing sytems to Syndicate Bank and companies like ATS, Mervin in US among others.

During the Tulec, Tata Infotech's education division, expanded its centres across India to 180. It also signed agreements with Intel and BaaN for establishing authorised training centres in the country. These efforts are expected to boostcompany's performance in the coming year.

Tata Infotech develops and distributes a host of hardware and softwar solutions through major companies like Unisys, Compaq, Sun, Business Objects, Microsoft and Orbix. Recently it picked up a major order from a Chines banking consortium to implement its banking solution for the group as part of its agrement with Unisys.