Business Desk, ETV Bharat: India’s Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) on Thursday pipped multinational tech company Accenture Plc to become the world’s most valuable IT firm for the first time ever.
TCS shares rose over 3% on Thursday to close at Rs 2,825 apiece, taking the firm’s market capitalization to $144.7 billon. In comparison, Accenture’s market cap stood at $143.74 billion, according to data from Bloomberg.
Though TCS shares slipped slightly on Friday, down 0.45% from their previous close, but the company’s market cap was still marginally higher than that of Accenture.
Interestingly, in India, TCS is still behind Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) that has a market cap of nearly $202 billion, according to Bloomberg.
TCS shares have jumped over 40% in the last one year. The stock got a major boost this week after the company decided to buy back its shares worth Rs 16,000 crore at a price of Rs 3,000 apiece.
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TCS also witnessed a 6.7% quarter-on-quarter rise in its profit after tax (PAT) to Rs 7,475 crore for the recently concluded September quarter. Consolidated revenue from operations, meanwhile, grew 4.7% to Rs 40,135 crore compared with the previous June quarter.
While announcing the quarterly earnings, TCS chief executive officer Rajesh Gopinathan said that IT budgets were bouncing back and growth should accelerate for the company as clients are spending on digital services such as cloud migration, security and work tools to trim costs.
Post earnings announcement, brokerage houses also gave a thumbs up to TCS’s Q2 numbers. CLSA said the company has kick-started Q2 earnings with a good quarterly performance, beating estimates on all fronts. It maintained an ‘outperform’ call on the stock with the target raised to Rs 2,750 per share from Rs 2,610 earlier.
Kotak Institutional Equities said market share gains and resilient spending by clients led to all-round growth for TCS in Q2. The brokerage firm maintained a ‘buy’ call on the stock with a target of Rs 2,800.
