CNBC TV18: Executive Vice Chairman of Cognizant India Articulates the Company’s Confidence in its Business Outlook

“We feel comfortable reaffirming our guidance of at least 16.5%,” says R. Chandrasekaran. “We are quite confident about the business outlook. That is why we have guided to at least 16.5% revenue growth in 2014. One reason is the robustness of the mix of services that we have—right from application outsourcing to infrastructure services to BPO to transformation type of services leveraging the SMAC stack. And we see a good balance. For example, in the first quarter, our discretionary spend on helping customers ‘run differently’ leveraging the SMAC stack improved significantly. The healthcare segment was completely offset by the bullish outlook in retail, manufacturing, and financial services segments. One quarter does not really make a trend. We hope that the U.S. will bounce back because we did have some healthy wins in outsourcing contracts, which are expected to ramp up in the second half of the year.”