Anup Gupta, Chief Operating Officer, WNS Global Services
“Ninety percent of our business is annuity-based long-term contracts, which involve mission-critical business processes. These are not discretionary projects dependent on annual budgets. Hence, it protects us from a short-term impact of any economic slowdown. If anything, the scope of our work may increase in a period of slowdown.

We don’t see anything unusual in the market yet except for regular seasonal variations. Our pipeline at this point is better than what it was last year. The number of RFPs and RFIs are significantly larger in volume and scale. And, this is happening across industries. The demand for domain expertise is going very high.
We are, however, watching expenses and productivity very closely. We are also keeping a close watch on customer-transaction volumes. Europe is a big portion of our business and the pipeline is very encouraging.
The trouble with the captive operations of large financial-services companies in India helps us by relieving wage pressure because the captives had initially recruited at higher salaries.”

George Svoboda, Senior Vice President, Alliance Business Development, Sitel
“Our pipeline remains very strong; we probably had one of the strongest quarters. The economy is forcing companies to look strongly at outsourcing to reduce costs and free up capital.

One thing we have observed is that for some of our large-contract customers, the impact of the economic slowdown has been that we are seeing a drop in call volumes. What it means for us is that customers don’t need so many people from our side to service them. It also gives us some spare capacity that we can re-sell to companies who want to outsource.

Some of our existing customers in the U.S. who are matured in the area of outsourcing would want to look at going offshore to locations like the Philippines to get obvious cost advantages. It does dilute our revenue base a little but profitability is good.

We also see a sense of urgency in customers to sign up deals. Because the number of companies seeking to go offshore is increasing, we are trying to add capacity in the Philippines and Central America. In the U.S., because of some customers moving offshore and the creation of spare capacity due to drop in call volumes, we don’t plan to increase capacity in the U.S. This is a change from what we had planned earlier.”

Rohit Kapoor, President and CEO, EXL Services
“If we divide our customers into two buckets — financial services including mortgage and others — we see that the financial and mortgage customers are somewhat frozen in terms of what they want to do. They are in the midst of fixing their businesses, raising capital and managing risk. But insurance is one of our major verticals, and has not been really impacted by the slowdown. We see the insurance segment moving forward very aggressively with cost-cutting and strong interest in offshoring.

Project sign-ups are getting accelerated. In the past, we had pilot phases for projects, but now it is broad phase adoption that customers are seeking.

Around 60 percent of the volume of the BPO work done in India is through captives, and the current economic situation in the U.S. has put some of them in trouble. Also, we have reached a stage where no new captive is being created. For these captive companies, a carve-out is a good option — it can be a source of revenue in itself. Valuation expectations of carve outs have come down rapidly. The current benchmark is the Philips-Infosys deal. We would not be averse to looking at such options.

Meanwhile, we are managing our cost structure, controlling all areas of G&A, and continuing to invest in sales and marketing.”

Anirban Dutta, Assistant Vice President, Strategic Deals Group, Satyam Computer Services
“Currency foreign exchange is a continuing strategic lever for managing our company’s financial strength, and we plan for it every financial quarter. However, the dramatic shift between the dollar and rupee continues to make this a challenge. Also there is some uncertainty as to how the U.S. markets will do from the financial standpoint (recession) for the remainder of the year. Any drastic recessionary impacts happening in the U.S. market may have some spillover effects globally. This pressure tends to focus firms on cost controls, and therefore, actually improves our firm's outlook for business.

Fortunately, the diversity of our revenue portfolio buffers us from the crisis in the financial sector. We have only approximately 12 percent of revenues coming from banking and insurance. The most significant impact remains to be seen, if businesses in this segment fail or significantly restructure.   

We have seen some sourcing decisions delayed as potential customers reassess plans and priorities, but we have not seen any major cancellations. We have a healthy pipeline of large deals (more than $50 million in total contract value) 20+ deals at greater than $2 billion, which we have managed to maintain over the last five to six quarters and it is in line with our expectations. We have not seen any adverse effects on rates; conversely, our rates have appreciated in some cases where customers have acknowledged the cost pressures.”