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Tuesday, July 29, 2025

29/07/25, BIZnews/TCS

 

Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) job cuts have dealt a major blow to the Indian IT industry and could trigger a ripple effect across its peers, industry experts warned. They cited margin pressures, obsolete skills, a sluggish growth environment, and disruption from artificial intelligence (AI) as key drivers behind the impending TCS layoffs.

TCS, which currently has an employee headcount of 6,13,000, is set to reduce about 2 percent of its global workforce in phases across FY26, which will impact roughly 12,200 employees, CEO and MD K Krithivasan told Moneycontrol in an exclusive interview on Sunday.

This will mark one of the biggest layoffs at least in the recent times in corporate
India and in the history of TCS.

“If TCS is doing it then it becomes more acceptable across the board. But, every IT organisation has been taking over some programme for margin improvement in the recent times. Margins have constantly been declining as managed services business is offering fairly low margin,” he said.

Not just TCS, even HCLTech had announced a similar talent ramp down over the next three-four quarters as it plans an organisational restructuring globally to achieve operational agility and protecting margins amid a shifting technology landscape dominated by AI.

“There will be some talent ramp down that has happened, especially in some of the geographies outside India. So that will also be part of the restructuring plan. More details we will share once we have a concrete timeline and plan agreed,” HCLTech CEO and MD C Vijayakumar had said at the company's Q1 earnings conference earlier this month.

According to Pareekh Jain, CEO of Pareekh Consulting and EIIRTrend, IT companies have already been laying off employees through various practices and reasons such as bench policies, performance-linked layoffs, eligibility tests and so on.

“This is not a micro-level issue, this a macro concern. After TCS, more companies who were not even thinking that long-term will now start seeing this a way to manage headcount and even start speaking about it openly. It won't stop at TCS' 2 percent,” Jain told Moneycontrol.

There were also quite a few acquisitions that happened for TCS' peers including HCLTech, Infosys and Wipro in the past couple of years adding more headcount that could get relooked, Jain said.

IT industry veteran and founder of staffing firm Diamondpick, Sriram Rajagopal expects more trimming to happen at the mid and senior levels across IT companies.

“Post pandemic, a lot of people got promoted and had to be given growth opportunities. Now, with Gen AI, you may not need as many headcount from those categories of people. If properly utilised, some of these co-pilots can drive productivity and lead to companies cutting jobs…when the margins are under stress you will go after non-billable people,” he said.

A Citi Research note said that despite not being the best pay-master, TCS has enjoyed lower-than-industry attrition levels as it offered long-term career path and job-stability to its employees.

"In the near term, the ongoing lay-offs will hurt employee morale and could potentially lead to execution slippages. In the longer run, such policies could drive a sharp rise in attrition, similar to what was seen at Cognizant during 2020-22," analysts at Citi wrote.

According to Ashutosh Sharma, VP & Research Director at Forrester this move “lowers the threshold” for other IT companies for adopting a similar practice
source: Network18

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