BENGALURU: India’s largest homegrown multi-billion-dollar IT services firms are set for a reality check with revenues likely to grow at the slowest pace since the global financial meltdown following the 2008 Lehman Brothers crisis.At least half-a-dozen analysts ET spoke to estimate that revenues of India’s top five IT companies — TCS HCL Tech and Tech Mahindra — will grow at single-digit rates (5-9%) in 2015-16, which is well below Nasscom ’s forecast for software export revenue growth of 12-14%. A Bloomberg poll of over 50 IT analysts confirms that these IT services behemoths will struggle to touch double-digit growth rates for the first time in over half a decade.“I think what we are seeing is a slowdown in the (traditional) hunting grounds, particularly around traditional application development maintenance (ADM) and BPO work,” said Jamie Snowdon, executive vice-president of research operations at HfS Research.Experts tracking the health of India’s $146-billion IT industry are blaming the slowdown in growth on a number of factors, including lower tech spending from top customers such as General Electric and Citigroup, a fundamental shift across the tech landscape and crosscurrency fluctuations over the past year. And of course, the latest impact from the Chennai floods, which have prompted the likes of TCS and Bengaluru-based Wipro to issue Q3 warnings. At a time when technology and business models are evolving with a shift towards newer technologies such as cloud computing, top customers are increasingly asking service providers to do more with less, which has in turn triggered a pricing war among the top players.“Typically, we are very selective with clients, we go after only Fortune 2000 companies, so whenever we have an opportunity in our client space and if it’s a large deal, we try to be as aggressive as our competition is and try to win that,” Infosys COO Pravin Rao said in an interview with ET in November.More worryingly, 2015-16 could also turn out to be the first time in years when none of India’s top 5 software firms meet, let alone exceed, Nasscom’s growth forecast for the year. “Our modelling has factored in a certain figure for the likes of TCS – now we have to wait and see how the Q3 numbers turn out, before we change our projections,” said a Nasscom executive, who declined to be named. “I think you also have to take into account at least 4-5 percentage points due to currency fluctuations over the past 5-6 years,” said a Mumbai-based analyst at a foreign brokerage, requesting anonymity. “Also, the legacy businesses are getting rationalised much faster than addition of revenue from newer areas.” Even from an incremental revenue perspective, the likes of TCS and Wipro are set to grow at a slower pace than the last 2-3 years – a benchmark that has been eroded further due to currency fluctuations.Incremental revenue, or additional revenue generated in a given period, has become one of the most important benchmarks to track in India’s IT industry as it reflects the competitive strength of a company and its ability to win new contracts.