Over the last one year, Teaneck, New Jersey-based Cognizant has managed to record consistent growth outperforming the industry. The Nasdaq-listed IT firm?s conscious step to maintain its operating margin between 19% and 20% and follow the reinvestment strategy in newer services and technologies, catapulted its performance against Indian peers. Cognizant Group chief executive (industries and markets) Rajeev Mehta tells Debojyoti Ghosh that the company is bullish about 2013 and barring any unexpected macro events, it is confident of meeting its full-year revenue target of $8.60 billion, up 17% compared with 2012. Edited excerpts:

Cognizant has been outperforming the industry for quite sometime now. What are the key factors enabling this growth?

The fundamental reason why we do well is because our business models run differently. We help customers run their operations faster and cost effectively. We have invested a lot in building our industry domain expertise and strong client-centric models. Our business is focussed on helping clients to move to newer technologies and leverage processes more efficiently and implement newer services and capabilities. Our client-centric model and investments that we have made in domain and consulting has driven our growth faster than competition.

Do you see the current growth rate as a sustaining trend?

We do see this as a sustaining trend for the company. We came out with a good guidance for the next quarter, we are also very optimistic about full year. This year we feel good about the trends in the sector. We have always said that we will grow faster than the industry average. All our businesses, including traditional IT-centric services, BPO, infrastructure and consulting, are growing strongly. Even our verticals like social, mobility and analytics are seeing phenomenal growth. Overall we are very bullish and see immense opportunity and investing heavily outside of North America as well.

Europe has done very well for us. We see tremendous traction in continental Europe. Despite the slowdown, opportunities have increased because of new service offerings to build newer models for clients.

We have seen about 23% year-on-year growth in Europe during the March quarter. Is it triggered by the recent buy in Germany?

The acquisition that we did was mainly to bring more local content in Germany. I wouldn?t say that the growth in the region was majorly due to the acquisition. We were witnessing a good growth in the region. However, it helped us build a stronger base and capabilities in Germany. It bought us closer to existing opportunities in the region. If we had 7% growth in Europe, acquisition would have added about 4% growth.

Cognizant has given a 2013 revenue guidance of $8.60 billion. Would $10 billion be the next target?

I would not like to comment on what our next target is going to be. We would like to see how we end up this year. We are quite bullish about 2013.

After a strong year, we would want to make sure that there are no macro trend or anything that come in place before we end this year. Let see how we finish 2013, before we comment on the next target.

What?s your take on the new US immigration Bill and its impact on the Indian outsourcing industry?

The way the Bill is being written, it obviously has a negative impact for the entire industry. There are restrictions and cost issues, which is negative. However, there are some good points like streamlining the green card processes.

Overall, the Bill currently shows a negative impact for the sector. The House is also working on it right now and that is going to be different from the current Bill. The fact remains that there are not enough technology talents in the US, so you cannot put a restriction on bringing technology talents into the country.

Traditionally healthcare is one of the strongest verticals for Cognizant, but during the March quarter it recorded a sequential growth of just 2%. What went wrong?

Normally when we look at healthcare it includes our pharmaceutical and life sciences businesses. At present we are facing some challenges in the life sciences business, though it is growing and not contracting at all. The challenge in this industry is that there are not much discretionary spend in new projects happening in the life sciences space. But we are quite optimistic and bullish about 2013. As lot of new drugs comes into the market we will see some good growth and discretionary spend in this space.