Wipro Technologies expects to win deals in the range of $100-300 million this year. It also hopes to see better IT budgets, which could go up by 2-3%. The firm?s CFO, Suresh Senapaty told Rachana Khanzode that margins should be stable while pricing for premium services could go up. Excerpts:
What is the environment like right now?
The macro environment is getting better and our clients are optimistic so discretionary spending is beginning to pick up. We see growth across the healthcare, financial services, retail and energy verticals and expect IT market budgets to grow by 2-3% this year.
Are we seeing the big-ticket deals coming back?
We are seeing better traction in $100-300 million deals and we did ink two $100 million-plus contracts. We are expecting such deal flows throughout the year including transformational, package implementation and system integration. There could be few mega deals which clients would give to either a single or two vendors.
How are these deals priced?
We expect pricing to be stable, though for premium services we hope for some improvement. We continue to focus on fixed price-long term contracts.
So are the current margins of above 24% sustainable?
For the medium to long term, they are sustainable but the currency will appreciate in line with the fair value-based on India?s GDP. So we expect it to appreciate normally. At the same time costs are going up but we?re working on that. For instance, in the March quarter, we restructured some of the firms that we acquired.