Happiest Minds Technologies on Tuesday reported a net profit of Rs 40.3 crore for the third quarter, 19.56% lower than the Rs 50-crore profit it posted a year ago. The drop came mainly due to a one-time charge of Rs 22.03 crore from the new Labour Codes. The IT company’s revenue increased by 10.69% at Rs 588 crore from Rs 530 crore reported in the same quarter last year.
On a quarterly basis, the revenue grew by 2.4% and the net profit fell by 25.4% from Rs 54 crore. The earnings before interest and taxes (Ebit) was up by 11.2% at Rs 85 crore compared with Rs 76.5 crore q-o-q.
On Tuesday, the company announced a new strategic initiative ‘AI First,’ which will “lead to an expansion of the company’s market share”, said founder and Executive Chairman Ashok Soota.
“With AI First. Agile Always, we have launched AI First as our 11th strategic transformation, supported by 11 strategic programs that together define how Happiest Minds will build, deliver and scale value in an AI-driven world,” he added.
What did Sridhar Mantha say?
Sridhar Mantha, CEO of GenAI Business Services, said that starting from the first quarter of FY27, they will also start reporting formally on AI and AI-led sales which will comprise both traditional AI sales as well as generative AI sales.
Managing Director Venkatraman Narayanan said: “We continue to deliver healthy revenue growth and operating and Ebitda margins in line with our commitments. I would like to draw your attention to the adjusted PAT, which excluding non-cash acquisition costs and the one-time wage code change, stood at 11.6% in the quarter, compared to 11% in the previous quarter.”
Happiest Minds added 32 GenAI and agentic AI use cases, which they said have progressed from the pilot stage, with many of them scaling into complete projects.
Joseph Anantharaju on AI use cases
Co-chairman and CEO Joseph Anantharaju said that as clients were moving from the experimentation stage and increasingly focusing on embedding AI into core work flows and platforms, the demand environment remains selective but more intentional.
The company also intends to double the team size for AI from 500 to 1,000 next year and ramp up investments in GenAI.
Mantha also said that Happiest Minds was looking to partner with an Agentic AI startup to speed up implementation and grow rapidly within the next three months.
The company’s employee headcount stood at 6,548 at the end of last year while trailing a 12-month attrition rate of 17.4%.