Forbes: Cognizant President Sees Healthy Growth in 2012

Gordon Coburn, President, Cognizant

“Cognizant’s Q1 performance beat guidance, with growth that topped the broader IT outsourcing industry,” says Gordon Coburn. “The company will still have industry leading growth.”

Coburn notes that acceleration coming out of Q1 into Q2 “is not as strong as anticipated” due to two areas of weakness: large banks in North America and the pharmaceutical sector. “Large banks are under a lot of cost pressures, and not launching as many discretionary IT projects as originally expected. Growth at mid-sized banks remains robust. Pharmaceutical companies are seeing similar issues, cutting costs as flagship drugs begin to come off patent. Drug companies are under-spending their IT budgets on concerns about top-line revenue growth.” Coburn emphasizes that there will healthy growth this year in spending by both banks and pharma companies, just not quite as strong as expected.

“The world has not fallen apart,” says Coburn. “Our business is still extraordinarily healthy. We continue to hire. So yes, acceleration is less than expected, but nothing has changed in our business, we are taking market share from the rest of the industry and we believe the fundamentals of the business remain as strong as ever.”

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