IT Q3 results preview – slow growth, but demand outlook seems to be improving

Slow growth in banking, financial services and insurance /hitech, but demand outlook seems to be improving.

1. Q3 is seasonally weak and there is no benefit in terms of sequential growth due to spillover of unspent budgets owing to weak H1. Higher furloughs were seen in BFSI/Hitech. Technology, media, and telecom remained weak for the quarter and has bottomed out.
2. The total contract value is likely to remain steady for most companies, tracking last twelve months trends
3. Beyond the quarter, demand outlook appears to be improving for BFSI and hitech, but has weakened for retail consumer packaged goods and energy verticals
4. We expect management commentary (for FY25) to turn incrementally positive.

The top six companies are expected to report no growth QoQ and YoY on an aggregate basis, with gains in Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., HCLTech Ltd. and LTIMindtree Ltd. getting offset by declines in Wipro and Tech Mahindra Ltd.

Within tier-I, HCLTech and LTIMindtree are expected to outperform peers with 4.4% and 1% QoQ growth – Latent View, Sonata Software and Intellect Design are expected to lead with 5.9%, 4.4% and 3.9% QoQ growth – Zensar Technologies and Wipro are likely to report significant QoQ declines of 3.2% and 2.4% – Auto engineering remains steady with KPIT Technologies and Tata Elxsi likely to report ~3% QOQ growth. NDTV Profit