Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Ltd, one of India's leading IT services firms, will gain from customers embarking on a multi-year technology upgrade cycle, said Rajesh Gopinathan, Managing Director and Chief Executive, during the company's 26th annual general meeting on Thursday.

“The year witnessed our customers leveraging technology across the entire value chain to achieve operational resilience and shift significantly to digital channels and accelerate shift to cloud, TCS participated significantly across this opportunity landscape recording 17.1% growth in our total contracts won in the year, more than $31.6 billion dollars in new contracts signed in the year FY21," Gopinathan said.

Technological transformation across multiple industries gives TCS long-term visibility in the demand environment. “We are gearing up for that," he added.

TCS will also focus on gaining a bigger market share. “Towards this, we are investing in deepening our transformation capabilities. While we stay open to inorganic acquisitions, our focus and commitment to organic talent development remains unwavering," he said.

According to Gopinathan, TCS has been investing in building skills at scale. “Totally TCSers logged over 43 million learning hours, and we were able to identify and groom more than 16,000 contextual masters and train more than 379,000 people on emerging digital skills," he added.

As part of its continued focus on research and development, TCS spent 1.2% of its total revenue, or ₹1,917 crore, in R&D and innovation during FY21. Besides expanding its foundational research capabilities in core computing and related streams, new areas of focus include DNA computing, artificial intelligence for protein design, cognitive robotics, meta materials, quantum computing and sensing.

TCS’s research and innovation teams have also been working on strategic initiatives such as patents, products and platforms (3P), technology change management, 5G, cloud and cybersecurity.