At a time when the Indian IT industry stares at headwinds due to COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted the global economy, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has said that it will not be giving any salary increments this time. However, TCS CEO and MD Rajesh Gopinathan said that he doesn’t see any retrenchment happening.

TCS will also be honouring all campus offers made this year. According to Milind Lakkad, EVP and Global Head of Human Resources at TCS, 40,000 campus offers were made this year. Most academic institutes will close their term only by mid-June and July and we will start on-boarding trainees from that point till the end of the year. But we will honour all the offers despite whatever situation we are in,” he said in response to a question during the company’s Q4 financial results announcement.

Milind also said that promotions will continue, but the quantum will depend of business performance and will be evaluated every quarter.

TCS currently has 448,464 employees as of March 31, 2020.

These announcements came as the company announced its financial earnings for Q4 of FY20 and for the financial year 2019-2020.

TCS reported a 0.9% year-on-year (YoY) fall in consolidated profit at Rs 8,049 crore for the fourth quarter.

For FY20, TCS clocked a revenue growth of 7.1% YoY to Rs.1,56,949 crore in constant current terms. Net Profit for the year was at Rs 32,340 crore, up 2.8% YoY.

"The pandemic completely reversed the positive momentum that we started seeing in some of our biggest verticals in the first half of the quarter. On the positive side, we had very strong deal closures during the quarter. In fact, our order book this quarter is the largest ever, from the time we started reporting the metric," Rajesh said.

According to the company, revenue growth was led by life sciences and healthcare (16.2%), communications & media (+9.3%) and manufacturing (+7%) verticals.

In terms of geographies, growth was led by Europe (+11.9%) and UK (+5.4); Latin America grew 3.9%, while Asia Pacific grew 3.5% and MEA grew 1.3%.

As of March 31, TCS applied for 5,216 patents, including 210 applied during the quarter, and has been granted 1,341 patents.