NYSE:INFY Infosys Q2 25/26 (Media) Earnings Report $12.82 +0.26 (+2.03%) Closing price 05/8/2026 03:59 PM EasternExtended Trading$12.84 +0.01 (+0.08%) As of 05/8/2026 07:47 PM Eastern Extended trading is trading that happens on electronic markets outside of regular trading hours. This is a fair market value extended hours price provided by Massive. Learn more. ProfileEarnings HistoryForecast Infosys EPS ResultsActual EPS$0.20Consensus EPS $0.20Beat/MissMet ExpectationsOne Year Ago EPSN/AInfosys Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$5.01 billionExpected Revenue$5.04 billionBeat/MissMissed by -$29.60 millionYoY Revenue GrowthN/AInfosys Announcement DetailsQuarterQ2 25/26 (Media)Date10/16/2025TimeAfter Market ClosesConference Call DateThursday, October 16, 2025Conference Call Time6:45AM ETUpcoming EarningsInfosys' Q1 26/27 earnings is estimated for Wednesday, July 22, 2026, based on past reporting schedules, with a conference call scheduled at 8:00 AM ET. Check back for transcripts, audio, and key financial metrics as they become available.Conference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptPress ReleaseInterim ReportEarnings HistoryCompany ProfilePowered by Infosys Q2 25/26 (Media) Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrOctober 16, 2025 ShareLink copied to clipboard.Key Takeaways Positive Sentiment: Infosys delivered strong Q2 results with revenues up 2.2% sequentially and 2.9% year‐on‐year in constant currency, a 21% operating margin, $3.1 B in large deals (67% net new), and a $1.6 B mega deal announced post-quarter. Positive Sentiment: Management raised FY24 revenue growth guidance to 2–3% in constant currency while maintaining operating margin guidance of 20–22%. Positive Sentiment: Clients are increasingly focusing on deploying enterprise AI for growth and cost efficiency, with Infosys scaling its forward-deployed engineering teams and positioning itself as an AI partner of choice. Negative Sentiment: Management noted ongoing macroeconomic uncertainties and seasonal headwinds in H2, with retail verticals showing constraints despite a strong large-deal pipeline. Neutral Sentiment: Despite H-1B visa tightening, Infosys says most U.S. employees don’t require sponsorship and is bolstering local hiring and nearshore hubs to ensure delivery continuity. AI Generated. May Contain Errors.Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallInfosys Q2 25/26 (Media)00:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2xTranscript SectionsPresentationParticipantsPresentationSkip to Participants Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:00:00A very good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining Infosys' second quarter financial results. My name is Rishi, and on behalf of Infosys, I'd like to welcome all of you. As always, we request one question, and with that, let me invite our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Salil Parekh, for his opening remarks. Over to you, Salil. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:00:20Thanks, Rishi. Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone, to the campus here, and welcome to our press conference event. We had a strong performance in Q2. Our revenues for the quarter grew 2.2% sequentially and 2.9% year-on-year in constant currency terms. Our operating margin was 21%. Our large deals were at $3.1 billion, out of which 67% was new or net new work. In addition, we announced a mega deal worth $1.6 billion after the close of the quarter, but today, before our results announcement. We've added 8,000 employees during the quarter. Our client interactions are showing a strong focus on deploying AI across the enterprise, both for growth and for cost efficiency programs. In doing this, we are continuing to scale our team of forward-deployed engineers. With a strong performance in Q2, we changed our revenue growth guidance for the financial year. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:01:31The new guidance is growth between 2% and 3% in constant currency terms for the full year, and our operating margin guidance remains the same as in the past quarter, at 20%-22% for the full year. With that, let's open it up for questions. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:01:50Thank you, Salil. We will now open the floor for questions. Joining Salil is Mr. Jayesh Sanghrajka, Chief Financial Officer, Infosys. The first question is from Ritu Singh from CNBC-TV18. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:02:01Thank you. Hi, Salil. Hi, Jayesh. Salil, firstly, on the guidance, the fact that you've tightened it but not really increased it from 1% to 3%, you've gone to 2% to 3%. And with a 2.2% growth this quarter as well, at the current run rate, you'll at most have a flat growth for the rest of the year for Q3 and Q4. With the current guidance, you'll easily get to the top end. So I wanted to understand, are you not seeing a meaningful recovery, especially when it comes to your manufacturing, retail, these kinds of verticals? What kind of headwinds do you continue to see? Because for Infosys, the contribution to revenues is slightly larger than peers. That was one. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:02:41Also, on the H-1B visa issue, if you could give us some details on how many employees you deployed on this visa for this year and the previous, maybe a couple of years, and whether you see now this as being something unviable, sending freshers on H-1B visas to work in the U.S.? If I may also ask, your peers like HCLTech have also started to quantify their AI revenues. We've been asking you this for several quarters now, and we understand AI cuts across services and sectors. Could you give us a sense of what exactly you're seeing there? And finally, the Versent Group acquisition, what exactly was the contribution to revenues and whether you're looking at further M&A in the region or outside? Thank you. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:03:26So let me start, and Jayesh will add in a couple of things. First, on the guidance and the environment. So in the guidance, typically, we have the second half of the year is slower than the first half. That's the normal pattern. So we've continued with that pattern. Having said that, we've seen good traction, and that's how we've actually increased the guidance. The previous guidance was 1%-3%, and now it's 2%-3%. So in a sense, we have much more confidence with the lower end being increased in what we see into the outlook for the year. In terms of the specific industries you mentioned, we had a good performance on manufacturing, on financial services. We still see constraints in retail. We do see a good pipeline there, and we will see how that plays out in the coming quarters. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:04:22Keeping all those things in mind and the global environment in terms of the macro, we decided to keep the guidance at 2%-3% with all of those factors that I mentioned. On the H-1B visa, what we've shared in the past, what we've shared recently, first, our U.S. workforce, the number of people that require Infosys sponsorship for immigration is a minority. So the majority of the people don't require it from our perspective. Second, we built a large number of centers and hubs which are focused on digital, on innovation, on technology, and AI in the U.S. We have relationships with universities. We have a training facility there. With all of that in mind, we are clear today that we will work with our clients without any disruption to their services and into the future. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:05:30We don't have any specific information to share on the numbers that you had suggested. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:05:38When you say a minority was dependent on the H-1B visa, could you give us, in person terms, how many of your employees that you were sending abroad were on these visas? And when you say there won't be any disruption, how exactly will that play out? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:05:54So we don't share the specific numbers, but the majority of our employees in the U.S. are employees who don't require any Infosys immigration support. The way we are working with our clients, we've reached out to each of them and made sure that we see and they see how their delivery continuity becomes on track and remains the way it is right now. Then on Versent, so first, there's nothing in the quarter. This quarter, they're going through all the approvals and so on. So the regulatory approval, which is a normal process, we'd anticipated it would come sometime in the coming months. Yes, we are very much looking at other acquisitions. We have a good pipeline. We don't know when those will materialize, but there are some opportunities there which we are looking at. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:07:02Sorry, the question on Versent was, going forward, what kind of contribution to revenue do you expect, and in M&A, what are the areas, what are the geographies where you're looking to fill the gaps? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:07:12On the contribution, we don't have anything to share now. When it closes, we will be in a position to give that information. Is there anything more on Versent? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:07:22I think we have given the last year's numbers of Versent already in the stock exchange filings that we did last time when we announced that, so you can make an estimate based on that, but just to add to what Salil was saying on the guidance as well, if you look at the commentary last time when we gave a guidance, we very clearly said that the upper end of the guidance is where we are expecting stability in the environment, and the lower end of the guidance is where we are expecting worsening in the environment. As we stand today, the environment still remains uncertain, and despite that, on the back of Q2 performance, we have tightened our guidance. Again, we are very clearly saying that at the lower end, we expect the worsening of the environment, and the upper end, we are expecting stability in the environment. Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:08:14On AI, I think we are scaling up massively on AI. We have a large team of FDEs. We are doing a lot of projects on enterprise AI with clients on growth, which is focused in the sales function or marketing function, on cost, which is focused on many of their processes, optimizing them on customer service, on code development. So there's a broad set of AI work that we are doing with our clients. There's a large number of clients for which Infosys is today the AI partner of choice. So we're going quite well. We have strong partnerships with a lot of different large tech companies. We believe there's a huge amount of opportunity in the enterprise AI space. And with our experience on how to navigate within the enterprise landscape, we are quite well positioned to help with that. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:09:13Thank you. The next question is from Jude from ET Now. Jude SannithBureau Chief at ET Now00:09:17Hi, Salil. Good to meet you here, and congratulations on that performance. You spoke about scaling up on the AI front. Could I get you to throw some light on what those specific deals are like? What is the AI order book shaping up to be at this point in time? And more importantly, what will your hiring trends be like for the rest of FY26? And I know for a fact that you have the confidence, which is why you've raised the lower end of the guidance. But what is the overall demand environment shaping up to be like for the fiscal? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:09:48So on AI, I think what we see today is a lot of interest where there's deep work going on, whether it's on a specific knowledge process, or it's in credit risk, or there's work doing on software development, or there's work going on on customer service. So a broad area of AI projects that we are working on. In some cases, we're working across an enterprise on transforming that enterprise from an AI perspective and making them the leading enterprise in their industry in AI. So good traction there. In fact, we have more and more of this that we want to start to share in the sense of what are the approach that we are taking, how it's working. And you'll see that as we go through in the next few months. On the environment, as Jayesh was sharing, the environment is still uncertain. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:10:43And what we see today is some changes in where the global environment macro is looking. We still see in some of our large markets that there is growth, but there's also some inflation. There's job creation, which is constrained. In some other markets, there are cost constraints. Some industries are seeing that. So that's a mix. Equally, we are seeing a lot of strength, for example, in financial services. Our client base is doing very well. We see extremely good growth. We've seen good growth in manufacturing in this quarter. We have a portfolio where we are across all of these different industries, which helps us to deliver the kind of performance that we've delivered for this quarter. On terms of hiring, so if you look at our hiring for this quarter, our net addition is already at 8,000. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:11:44We had given a guidance in terms of the fresh hiring for the year, and we had said 15,000 to 20,000, what we expect. We have hired in the first half 12,000 plus freshers already, so we are well on our track to hire close to 20,000 this year. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:12:00Thank you. The next question is from Uma Kannan from Deccan Herald. Uma KannanJournalist at Deccan Herald00:12:04Good evening. In the last couple of years, Europe has been constantly outperforming for you. So what are the factors driving that? And can you give us some update on Project Maximus and its impact on your performance? And one more on fresher hiring. Have you onboarded all freshers whom you have offered? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:12:26On the Maximus and the hiring, Jayesh will come back. On Europe, I think Europe has done extremely well for us. We made some good investments in different countries across Europe. We've seen also, especially in the time you mentioned, the past two years, there's been a lot of opening up of companies in Europe in different countries to looking at the sort of services that we are offering, to looking at both transformation and cost efficiency, and there we've played quite well in those markets. Having said that, we still see the U.S. market is also a very good market, and we will continue to grow. We will continue to make acquisitions. We'll continue to invest in both of those markets and other markets around the world. Yeah. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:13:13So on hiring, as I said earlier, we have hired net 8,000 employees, and we have hired 12,000 freshers this half already, and they're already being onboarded as we speak. In terms of Project Maximus, I think Project Maximus has continued to deliver. If you look at last year, we expanded margins by 50 basis points despite multiple headwinds, compensation related. We had a higher variable pay. We had impact coming from the acquisition and multiple mega deals that we signed in the year before they were ramping up. So we absorbed all of those headwinds, and we were able to expand margin by 50 basis points. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:13:48Even this quarter, if you look at, we've expanded margin by 20 basis points sequentially, and the Project Maximus has delivered 30 basis points out of that, where pricing gave us a tailwind, and that was offset by higher subcon and lower onsite utilization. So the project is in works. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:14:09Thank you. The next question is from Beena Parmar from The Economic Times. Beena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic Times00:14:15Salil, you've seen some reduction in your contribution from your top five and 10 clients. Could you give us some sense why that is happening, and how do you see that in the next two quarters? And in terms of the hiring, what sort of outlook do you have overall for, say, campus and off-campus hiring, especially because of the way things are moving? While the pipeline has been strong, the market continues to remain uncertain. And secondly, in terms of the pipeline, where is the growth? Where is the deal pipeline coming from? Which sectors is it coming from, and which geographies? And lastly, in terms of the margins, what are the levers, given that you've already done with your wage hikes, and you also plan to onboard freshers? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:15:12So let me start with the pipeline view, and some of the others. Jayesh, if you look at, you can combine those. So our pipeline remains very strong right now on large deals. What we are seeing is a lot of our clients are quite focused on cost optimization, consolidation. We are benefiting from consolidation plays on automation and on using AI for efficiency. That's, let's say, the big focus that we see from our clients across industries. And I'll come to the specific industries. And then we see some attention to using AI for some of their growth activities and what we can do with an AI transformation. Now, within all of that, we see some of our industry segments with the pipeline doing well. There are some places, for example, in financial services, where we see good traction with clients. We see good traction in manufacturing. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:16:15Our pipeline in retail is looking good, and we are looking to see how that can be now converted. The overall sentiment, though, is a good large deal pipeline with a view to much more focus on cost efficiency and automation and those types of activities. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:16:38Margin hiring. Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:16:39Margin hiring. Yeah, so if you look at client contribution, I think those changes are very marginal. There's not too much to read in that because there are always certain projects that ramp up, ramp down, so that's what it is. It's not anything to note there. In terms of margin, tailwinds and headwinds, if you look at, as we get into the second part of the year, which is seasonally softer part of the year, we have lower working days, furloughs, etc., which will come as a headwind. We also have Project Maximus and multiple tracks of Project Maximus that will continue delivering. There is pricing, which is a track there. There is a lean and automation, which continues to deliver value there. There are large portfolio, large programs that we are running. We continue optimizing them. Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:17:25So there are multiple tracks that we run there, which will become a tailwind in a way. The freshers that we have hired, once they start getting onboarded on the projects, the pyramid starts giving benefit as well. So I think all of those will become a tailwind. Beena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic Times00:17:38In terms of the acquisitions, how much has it contributed, and how much will it contribute in terms of the guidance that you've given? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:17:46So this quarter, it's only 20 basis points out of the 2.2% because two months, we already had last quarter, two months baked in already. So that is already baked in in the guidance. The project Versent that we talked about, the JV in Australia, that will only get baked in as and when we close it. Beena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic Times00:18:08In the guidance also, you expected to be around 20 basis points in the Q3 and Q4? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:18:14No. That's already in the run rate, so it's already in the run rate. There's nothing additional that we are baking in from that perspective. Beena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic Times00:18:22One last thing. In terms of the AI talk that's going on, your larger rival has kind of announced their AI, sorry, your immediate smaller rival has announced AI contribution to the revenue. Could you tell us if you would be looking at anything of this sort this year, in the next quarter or fourth quarter, and when do you see that happening, if at all? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:18:50So there, our focus has been to mainly share what we are doing on AI externally, and that's what we are doing. We, of course, track all of that internally, and as the right time comes, we will start to share that externally. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:19:07Thank you. The next question is from Jas Bardia from Mint. Jas BardiaSenior Correspondent and Reporter at Mint00:19:12Good evening. Just a couple of questions. As per your AI strategy, would you continue with the current asset-light model of embedding AI in your software services, or are you looking at entering the AI infrastructure play and probably deploying huge amounts of capital? Second question, as part of the legacy modernization deals, are you seeing more business on a net-net basis because of AI tools being used to modernize those applications? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:19:39So on the modernization first, I think, in fact, modernization is a huge opportunity because of AI. So what's happening with modernization is, in the past, without the AI tools, you could do modernization, but clients needed a longer time horizon. With some of the AI tools, the time horizon becomes less. And as a consequence, the ROI for the client on that program is much better. So what we anticipate now is, as the AI tools mature, we will see more and more of them being deployed on the modernization programs. On the first part, I think we are comfortable with the strategy that we have today. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:20:27Thank you, Jayesh. The next question is from Veena Mani from The Times of India. Veena ManiSpecial Correspondent at The Times of India00:20:32Good evening, gentlemen. I want to understand in the backdrop of the H-1B issues, for the last few years, itself, Infosys has been strengthening its nearshore centers. If you could give me a sense on how it has grown, and at this point in time, how many of your employees are based in nearshore locations, and what is your nearshore strategy going to be, given that now the U.S. has made H-1B norms a lot more stricter now? Also, you talked about the mega deal. If you could give us a sense of which sector it is and what is the AI element embedded in it? And on the fresher hiring, you mentioned 12K. Out of them, what proportion of the freshers are premium talent in the sense that they are already skilled in something and not just vanilla talent? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:21:28So on the mega deal first, I think we've already announced it. It's with U.K. NHS. That's the one you're referring to. We made the announcement just after the close of the quarter. It's a complete transformation of what they're doing. We're supporting it with many new technologies, and AI is very much part of it. It's a huge program in the way that they have trusted us to deliver it. And we work with many different partners to make sure that all of this is delivered effectively for them. But it's just the start. As we go through it, more of that will become public. On the nearshore, so nearshore has been a huge success for us. Many years ago, we started the approach within our strategy of localization in each of our geographies, so in Europe, in Australia, in the U.S. And that has really matured a lot. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:22:37So part of that is we are hiring local people in each of the geographies. And part of that is we are building the nearshore centers, whether those are in the U.S. and around the U.S., like Canada or Mexico or other places in Latin America or in Europe and so on. So that part has really gone extremely well, and we feel quite confident that that will scale even further with all the changes. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:23:08Question on fresher hiring. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:23:09Yeah. So on the freshers, we don't really split out how many of them are higher skills and how many of them are the regular skills. But every fresher will go through the certain trainings, depending on the requirement and depending on the skill set. So we will execute on that. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:23:24Thank you, Veena. The next question is from Rukmini Rao from Fortune India. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:23:30Salil, at the board level, wanted to understand in extreme uncertain conditions where you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. For leaders, what is it sort of what kind of drawing is happening at the boardroom table on how to deal with it? And also, is there some sort of additions to your contingency plans? The other one was you have also disclosed the DOJ investigation happening on H-1B, and you are also internally investigating. Some sense of clarity on what is happening, the kind of inquiry that you're doing within the company. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:24:05And also, on the AI piece, with the partnerships that all of you are all doing with hyperscalers, looking at what happened with Deloitte, in terms of these partnerships, right, and given that these technologies are still so newer, what sort of indemnity comes in these contracts where if something goes wrong with, let's say, any of the hyperscaler platforms that you're working on, I mean, is the entire risk on you, or do they also take up any risk? Because if things go wrong, it can be a huge monetary risk that can be posed to any of the players. Thank you. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:24:41So on the first one, I think we are fortunate with our board to have people, of course, with Nandan there, who are really very experienced in looking at global situations and looking at things over the years. So the board is quite well prepared. The type of environment is different, but equally, the board is well prepared to understand and work with what those uncertainties are. The board looks at different ways and scenarios of what could play out, not from a quarterly business perspective, but much more from how we should look at overall. We, of course, have a risk committee that works extremely well. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:25:26Many of these different scenarios are looked at carefully and evaluated on a regular basis, but with a lot of attention, as I said, with someone like Nandan being on the board and many of the other board members that we have. On the partnerships, so there's a lot of new things happening in AI. And the questions that you ask on liabilities and so on are still not fully clarified from a legal perspective. So we've been quite clear and careful in making sure that we can take on the responsibility for what we have control for. Beyond that, it's difficult to. So whether it's in a discussion with a client or with a partner, that's the sort of guideline that we use. And on the investigation, we have no comments at this stage. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:26:23Thank you, Rukmini. The next question is from Sanjana from the Hindu Business Line. Sanjana BBusiness Reporter at businessline00:26:28Good evening, gentlemen, so just for you to understand, you've made quite a few acquisitions in this calendar year alone, some commentary on the kind of organic moves you are examining and contributions from such moves to the overall growth, and also, some of your peers, as well as you who announced a mega deal in the public sector, some of your peers are also announcing a lot of deals. Do you think that you will be examining this particular sector more closely across your geographies, and also, pertaining to the recent buyback announcement, if you could elaborate on the contours of the announcement, what was the size, sorry, how was the size and the pricing determined, and also some commentary on the outlook for H2 or FY26. Thank you. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:27:23Okay, let me start with those. I think on the public sector first, we've always had a good attention to it. Now we are even more focused on it in different markets. We've done pretty well in the public sector, in the Australian market. We have a pretty decent small business in the U.S. market. With this, we start to expand more in the U.K. market. So we absolutely have a focus on it. We also find public sector is opening up to this sort of change and the sort of capabilities that we bring that they have much more interest to. Of course, in India itself, we do, I think, quite incredible work with the income tax, with the GSTN, and so on. So we have pretty good experience in that, which we can leverage now globally. What was the? Are the inorganic? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:28:22I think our focus is very much on making sure that we have a business that's growing well organically. And then we have a strategic view on what we should look at in terms of acquisitions. So acquisitions are the main driver in that sense of our growth. But where we see something that can add to our capability, either in an industry or in a skill area like a service line or in a geography where we want to expand, those are the ones that we've done, whether it was energy and consulting, whether it was cybersecurity, whether this one, which is focused on digital and AI and cloud. So those are the types of areas we are focused on. And we will continue in that sort of a scale where the primary, of course, is we want to work in the organic sense with our clients. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:29:17Thank you. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:29:17The buyback? Yeah, let me just start, and you can add. So the primary approach, we have a capital return policy, and that guides all of our decision-making on that. So in that, we have a policy where we return 85% of our free cash flow over a five-year period. And then we have in that each year our regular dividend, and then we have other ways of returning. So that's the guideline. And then, Jayesh, you can add more. Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:29:52Yeah, so within that guideline, if you look at, we are in the second year right now. Last year, we had a very strong cash flow on the back of tax refund that we got. So we had a headroom in terms of returning additional capital back to the shareholders. And as part of that, we looked at various options. And one of that was buyback, which is what we executed. The amount of 18,000 crores at INR 1,800, which we will be executing. At this point in time, we are awaiting shareholder approval. The postal ballot is already out. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:30:28Salil, Ritu again from CNBC. Since we haven't got a very clear response in terms of your outlook for what happens with these H-1B visas, I mean, very simply, to just answer the question, do you think it's viable to continue sending your employees on these visas? Are you going to participate in the next cycle, or is there going to be a significant pullback even in this minority number that you currently have? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:30:50So what I shared earlier, what we have today in the U.S., we have the majority of our people who are not requiring any Infosys sort of immigration support. What we will do in the future will be guided by how we work with our clients, how we scale up what we've been doing there in terms of the discussion we had on nearshore in the local hiring, the localization that we've been working on. So that's the approach that we will take. And we've been working with our clients over the last few weeks to make sure that the service delivery continuity, business continuity remains current. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:31:40The U.S. company is required to pay that large sum of money to send your employees to the U.S. anymore? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:31:49On the H-1B visa, the response that I have is what I've shared earlier, and that's what we can share. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:31:58Thank you. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:32:04Salil, you also did not come to the new subsidiary in Egypt. Is that anything got to do with the North Africa market, or just broadly wanted to understand why that? And also, Jayesh, the subcontracting cost has gone up. So is that very niche? Is that AI skill sort of guys that you have added to this? Just to understand. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:32:25So the Egypt subsidiary is a particular requirement for a particular project. That is why we had to set up an entity because the client is based in Egypt, and we had to send some people. And that's how we expand across the globe. So that's where it is. Subcontractor cost keeps going up and down depending on the requirement, how we see the demand environment, and how we have the talent that we fulfill. Part of that could be new-age skills like AI skills, etc. Part of that could be the regular demand that we need to meet depending on the project and the location requirements. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:33:00Thank you, Rukmini. Thank you. With that, we sorry. Okay, go ahead, please. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:33:10Hi. Your fact sheet, yes, your voluntary attrition has marginally dropped from the previous quarter. But if you look at it from the previous year, it has increased. In this sort of a market, what is leading to this increase in the voluntary attrition? That's number one. The other thing is about your Hubli campus. You were giving your employees Hubli. You've been giving your employees cash incentives to move to the Hubli campus. But have you directly recruited there? From what I hear, is that Infosys is not directly hiring at the Hubli campus and is going to wait till the next year to get people locally into that campus. If you could tell me a little bit about that. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:33:58Yeah, so in terms of the campus movement, you always need to have certain senior people move to those campuses so that you start meeting the demand requirement. And that's how you incentivize people to move to certain campuses, and then you start building the team below that. So that is where we have made incentives to certain employees, certain of our employees, to move to those campuses, right? There's nothing beyond that. And we have, and we will continue hiring locally in the Hubli as well. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:34:26Started hiring locally? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:34:28We have hired a few people in the Hubli. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:34:30At what seniority? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:34:31We don't give out numbers by campus, so yeah. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:34:35You shared that you didn't continue around January and April. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:34:38So yeah, we just did it in January and April. We will decide. So it's generally an annual cycle, so we will look at it in future. We have not decided anything for this year at this point. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:34:48Thank you. With that, we come to the end of this Q&A session and the press conference. We thank our friends from media. Thank you, Salil, and thank you, Jayesh. Before we conclude, please note that the archived webcast of this press conference will be available on the Infosys website and on our YouTube channel later today. Thank you, and please join us for some high tea outside.Read moreParticipantsExecutivesSalil ParekhCEORishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor RelationsJayesh SanghrajkaCFOAnalystsRitu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV18Jas BardiaSenior Correspondent and Reporter at MintVeena ManiSpecial Correspondent at The Times of IndiaSanjana BBusiness Reporter at businesslineJude SannithBureau Chief at ET NowBeena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic TimesRukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune IndiaUma KannanJournalist at Deccan HeraldPowered by Earnings DocumentsEarnings Release Infosys Earnings HeadlinesInfosys: Next Fiscal Year Is Another Low-Single-Digit Growth Year (Rating Downgrade)May 7 at 4:01 AM | seekingalpha.comInfosys Ltd. ADR rises Wednesday, still underperforms marketMay 6, 2026 | marketwatch.comTrump Just Named His Secret AI Project. It's Called "Golden Dawn."Behind a hidden government lab in Tennessee, 40,000 scientists are reportedly finishing work on an AI system described as 283 trillion times more powerful than today's data centers - spanning over 700 miles. Called 'Golden Dawn,' this project could leapfrog ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok upon launch and potentially trigger a $100 trillion reset of AI markets. Louis Navellier is naming the one stock at the center of it, down to the ticker, free through May 5th.May 10 at 1:00 AM | InvestorPlace (Ad)Infosys Ltd. ADR outperforms competitors on strong trading dayMay 6, 2026 | marketwatch.comInfosys (INFY) Q2 2026 Earnings TranscriptMay 4, 2026 | finance.yahoo.comInfosys Ranked as Number One IT Services Provider for Banking in Europe and Financial Services in Nordics by Whitelane ResearchApril 30, 2026 | prnewswire.comSee More Infosys Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like Infosys? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on Infosys and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About InfosysInfosys (NYSE:INFY) is a global leader in digital services and consulting, serving clients in more than 50 countries. Established in 1981 and headquartered in Bengaluru, India, Infosys has grown into one of the world's leading technology services companies. The company offers a broad range of services, including business consulting, technology solutions, cloud and infrastructure, data analytics, and AI-driven enterprise offerings. Infosys pioneered the Global Delivery Model and, in March 1999, became the first Indian company to be listed on NASDAQ—later transferring its listing to the NYSE, where it trades today under the ticker INFY. 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PresentationSkip to Participants Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:00:00A very good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining Infosys' second quarter financial results. My name is Rishi, and on behalf of Infosys, I'd like to welcome all of you. As always, we request one question, and with that, let me invite our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Salil Parekh, for his opening remarks. Over to you, Salil. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:00:20Thanks, Rishi. Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone, to the campus here, and welcome to our press conference event. We had a strong performance in Q2. Our revenues for the quarter grew 2.2% sequentially and 2.9% year-on-year in constant currency terms. Our operating margin was 21%. Our large deals were at $3.1 billion, out of which 67% was new or net new work. In addition, we announced a mega deal worth $1.6 billion after the close of the quarter, but today, before our results announcement. We've added 8,000 employees during the quarter. Our client interactions are showing a strong focus on deploying AI across the enterprise, both for growth and for cost efficiency programs. In doing this, we are continuing to scale our team of forward-deployed engineers. With a strong performance in Q2, we changed our revenue growth guidance for the financial year. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:01:31The new guidance is growth between 2% and 3% in constant currency terms for the full year, and our operating margin guidance remains the same as in the past quarter, at 20%-22% for the full year. With that, let's open it up for questions. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:01:50Thank you, Salil. We will now open the floor for questions. Joining Salil is Mr. Jayesh Sanghrajka, Chief Financial Officer, Infosys. The first question is from Ritu Singh from CNBC-TV18. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:02:01Thank you. Hi, Salil. Hi, Jayesh. Salil, firstly, on the guidance, the fact that you've tightened it but not really increased it from 1% to 3%, you've gone to 2% to 3%. And with a 2.2% growth this quarter as well, at the current run rate, you'll at most have a flat growth for the rest of the year for Q3 and Q4. With the current guidance, you'll easily get to the top end. So I wanted to understand, are you not seeing a meaningful recovery, especially when it comes to your manufacturing, retail, these kinds of verticals? What kind of headwinds do you continue to see? Because for Infosys, the contribution to revenues is slightly larger than peers. That was one. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:02:41Also, on the H-1B visa issue, if you could give us some details on how many employees you deployed on this visa for this year and the previous, maybe a couple of years, and whether you see now this as being something unviable, sending freshers on H-1B visas to work in the U.S.? If I may also ask, your peers like HCLTech have also started to quantify their AI revenues. We've been asking you this for several quarters now, and we understand AI cuts across services and sectors. Could you give us a sense of what exactly you're seeing there? And finally, the Versent Group acquisition, what exactly was the contribution to revenues and whether you're looking at further M&A in the region or outside? Thank you. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:03:26So let me start, and Jayesh will add in a couple of things. First, on the guidance and the environment. So in the guidance, typically, we have the second half of the year is slower than the first half. That's the normal pattern. So we've continued with that pattern. Having said that, we've seen good traction, and that's how we've actually increased the guidance. The previous guidance was 1%-3%, and now it's 2%-3%. So in a sense, we have much more confidence with the lower end being increased in what we see into the outlook for the year. In terms of the specific industries you mentioned, we had a good performance on manufacturing, on financial services. We still see constraints in retail. We do see a good pipeline there, and we will see how that plays out in the coming quarters. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:04:22Keeping all those things in mind and the global environment in terms of the macro, we decided to keep the guidance at 2%-3% with all of those factors that I mentioned. On the H-1B visa, what we've shared in the past, what we've shared recently, first, our U.S. workforce, the number of people that require Infosys sponsorship for immigration is a minority. So the majority of the people don't require it from our perspective. Second, we built a large number of centers and hubs which are focused on digital, on innovation, on technology, and AI in the U.S. We have relationships with universities. We have a training facility there. With all of that in mind, we are clear today that we will work with our clients without any disruption to their services and into the future. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:05:30We don't have any specific information to share on the numbers that you had suggested. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:05:38When you say a minority was dependent on the H-1B visa, could you give us, in person terms, how many of your employees that you were sending abroad were on these visas? And when you say there won't be any disruption, how exactly will that play out? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:05:54So we don't share the specific numbers, but the majority of our employees in the U.S. are employees who don't require any Infosys immigration support. The way we are working with our clients, we've reached out to each of them and made sure that we see and they see how their delivery continuity becomes on track and remains the way it is right now. Then on Versent, so first, there's nothing in the quarter. This quarter, they're going through all the approvals and so on. So the regulatory approval, which is a normal process, we'd anticipated it would come sometime in the coming months. Yes, we are very much looking at other acquisitions. We have a good pipeline. We don't know when those will materialize, but there are some opportunities there which we are looking at. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:07:02Sorry, the question on Versent was, going forward, what kind of contribution to revenue do you expect, and in M&A, what are the areas, what are the geographies where you're looking to fill the gaps? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:07:12On the contribution, we don't have anything to share now. When it closes, we will be in a position to give that information. Is there anything more on Versent? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:07:22I think we have given the last year's numbers of Versent already in the stock exchange filings that we did last time when we announced that, so you can make an estimate based on that, but just to add to what Salil was saying on the guidance as well, if you look at the commentary last time when we gave a guidance, we very clearly said that the upper end of the guidance is where we are expecting stability in the environment, and the lower end of the guidance is where we are expecting worsening in the environment. As we stand today, the environment still remains uncertain, and despite that, on the back of Q2 performance, we have tightened our guidance. Again, we are very clearly saying that at the lower end, we expect the worsening of the environment, and the upper end, we are expecting stability in the environment. Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:08:14On AI, I think we are scaling up massively on AI. We have a large team of FDEs. We are doing a lot of projects on enterprise AI with clients on growth, which is focused in the sales function or marketing function, on cost, which is focused on many of their processes, optimizing them on customer service, on code development. So there's a broad set of AI work that we are doing with our clients. There's a large number of clients for which Infosys is today the AI partner of choice. So we're going quite well. We have strong partnerships with a lot of different large tech companies. We believe there's a huge amount of opportunity in the enterprise AI space. And with our experience on how to navigate within the enterprise landscape, we are quite well positioned to help with that. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:09:13Thank you. The next question is from Jude from ET Now. Jude SannithBureau Chief at ET Now00:09:17Hi, Salil. Good to meet you here, and congratulations on that performance. You spoke about scaling up on the AI front. Could I get you to throw some light on what those specific deals are like? What is the AI order book shaping up to be at this point in time? And more importantly, what will your hiring trends be like for the rest of FY26? And I know for a fact that you have the confidence, which is why you've raised the lower end of the guidance. But what is the overall demand environment shaping up to be like for the fiscal? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:09:48So on AI, I think what we see today is a lot of interest where there's deep work going on, whether it's on a specific knowledge process, or it's in credit risk, or there's work doing on software development, or there's work going on on customer service. So a broad area of AI projects that we are working on. In some cases, we're working across an enterprise on transforming that enterprise from an AI perspective and making them the leading enterprise in their industry in AI. So good traction there. In fact, we have more and more of this that we want to start to share in the sense of what are the approach that we are taking, how it's working. And you'll see that as we go through in the next few months. On the environment, as Jayesh was sharing, the environment is still uncertain. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:10:43And what we see today is some changes in where the global environment macro is looking. We still see in some of our large markets that there is growth, but there's also some inflation. There's job creation, which is constrained. In some other markets, there are cost constraints. Some industries are seeing that. So that's a mix. Equally, we are seeing a lot of strength, for example, in financial services. Our client base is doing very well. We see extremely good growth. We've seen good growth in manufacturing in this quarter. We have a portfolio where we are across all of these different industries, which helps us to deliver the kind of performance that we've delivered for this quarter. On terms of hiring, so if you look at our hiring for this quarter, our net addition is already at 8,000. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:11:44We had given a guidance in terms of the fresh hiring for the year, and we had said 15,000 to 20,000, what we expect. We have hired in the first half 12,000 plus freshers already, so we are well on our track to hire close to 20,000 this year. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:12:00Thank you. The next question is from Uma Kannan from Deccan Herald. Uma KannanJournalist at Deccan Herald00:12:04Good evening. In the last couple of years, Europe has been constantly outperforming for you. So what are the factors driving that? And can you give us some update on Project Maximus and its impact on your performance? And one more on fresher hiring. Have you onboarded all freshers whom you have offered? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:12:26On the Maximus and the hiring, Jayesh will come back. On Europe, I think Europe has done extremely well for us. We made some good investments in different countries across Europe. We've seen also, especially in the time you mentioned, the past two years, there's been a lot of opening up of companies in Europe in different countries to looking at the sort of services that we are offering, to looking at both transformation and cost efficiency, and there we've played quite well in those markets. Having said that, we still see the U.S. market is also a very good market, and we will continue to grow. We will continue to make acquisitions. We'll continue to invest in both of those markets and other markets around the world. Yeah. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:13:13So on hiring, as I said earlier, we have hired net 8,000 employees, and we have hired 12,000 freshers this half already, and they're already being onboarded as we speak. In terms of Project Maximus, I think Project Maximus has continued to deliver. If you look at last year, we expanded margins by 50 basis points despite multiple headwinds, compensation related. We had a higher variable pay. We had impact coming from the acquisition and multiple mega deals that we signed in the year before they were ramping up. So we absorbed all of those headwinds, and we were able to expand margin by 50 basis points. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:13:48Even this quarter, if you look at, we've expanded margin by 20 basis points sequentially, and the Project Maximus has delivered 30 basis points out of that, where pricing gave us a tailwind, and that was offset by higher subcon and lower onsite utilization. So the project is in works. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:14:09Thank you. The next question is from Beena Parmar from The Economic Times. Beena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic Times00:14:15Salil, you've seen some reduction in your contribution from your top five and 10 clients. Could you give us some sense why that is happening, and how do you see that in the next two quarters? And in terms of the hiring, what sort of outlook do you have overall for, say, campus and off-campus hiring, especially because of the way things are moving? While the pipeline has been strong, the market continues to remain uncertain. And secondly, in terms of the pipeline, where is the growth? Where is the deal pipeline coming from? Which sectors is it coming from, and which geographies? And lastly, in terms of the margins, what are the levers, given that you've already done with your wage hikes, and you also plan to onboard freshers? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:15:12So let me start with the pipeline view, and some of the others. Jayesh, if you look at, you can combine those. So our pipeline remains very strong right now on large deals. What we are seeing is a lot of our clients are quite focused on cost optimization, consolidation. We are benefiting from consolidation plays on automation and on using AI for efficiency. That's, let's say, the big focus that we see from our clients across industries. And I'll come to the specific industries. And then we see some attention to using AI for some of their growth activities and what we can do with an AI transformation. Now, within all of that, we see some of our industry segments with the pipeline doing well. There are some places, for example, in financial services, where we see good traction with clients. We see good traction in manufacturing. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:16:15Our pipeline in retail is looking good, and we are looking to see how that can be now converted. The overall sentiment, though, is a good large deal pipeline with a view to much more focus on cost efficiency and automation and those types of activities. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:16:38Margin hiring. Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:16:39Margin hiring. Yeah, so if you look at client contribution, I think those changes are very marginal. There's not too much to read in that because there are always certain projects that ramp up, ramp down, so that's what it is. It's not anything to note there. In terms of margin, tailwinds and headwinds, if you look at, as we get into the second part of the year, which is seasonally softer part of the year, we have lower working days, furloughs, etc., which will come as a headwind. We also have Project Maximus and multiple tracks of Project Maximus that will continue delivering. There is pricing, which is a track there. There is a lean and automation, which continues to deliver value there. There are large portfolio, large programs that we are running. We continue optimizing them. Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:17:25So there are multiple tracks that we run there, which will become a tailwind in a way. The freshers that we have hired, once they start getting onboarded on the projects, the pyramid starts giving benefit as well. So I think all of those will become a tailwind. Beena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic Times00:17:38In terms of the acquisitions, how much has it contributed, and how much will it contribute in terms of the guidance that you've given? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:17:46So this quarter, it's only 20 basis points out of the 2.2% because two months, we already had last quarter, two months baked in already. So that is already baked in in the guidance. The project Versent that we talked about, the JV in Australia, that will only get baked in as and when we close it. Beena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic Times00:18:08In the guidance also, you expected to be around 20 basis points in the Q3 and Q4? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:18:14No. That's already in the run rate, so it's already in the run rate. There's nothing additional that we are baking in from that perspective. Beena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic Times00:18:22One last thing. In terms of the AI talk that's going on, your larger rival has kind of announced their AI, sorry, your immediate smaller rival has announced AI contribution to the revenue. Could you tell us if you would be looking at anything of this sort this year, in the next quarter or fourth quarter, and when do you see that happening, if at all? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:18:50So there, our focus has been to mainly share what we are doing on AI externally, and that's what we are doing. We, of course, track all of that internally, and as the right time comes, we will start to share that externally. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:19:07Thank you. The next question is from Jas Bardia from Mint. Jas BardiaSenior Correspondent and Reporter at Mint00:19:12Good evening. Just a couple of questions. As per your AI strategy, would you continue with the current asset-light model of embedding AI in your software services, or are you looking at entering the AI infrastructure play and probably deploying huge amounts of capital? Second question, as part of the legacy modernization deals, are you seeing more business on a net-net basis because of AI tools being used to modernize those applications? Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:19:39So on the modernization first, I think, in fact, modernization is a huge opportunity because of AI. So what's happening with modernization is, in the past, without the AI tools, you could do modernization, but clients needed a longer time horizon. With some of the AI tools, the time horizon becomes less. And as a consequence, the ROI for the client on that program is much better. So what we anticipate now is, as the AI tools mature, we will see more and more of them being deployed on the modernization programs. On the first part, I think we are comfortable with the strategy that we have today. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:20:27Thank you, Jayesh. The next question is from Veena Mani from The Times of India. Veena ManiSpecial Correspondent at The Times of India00:20:32Good evening, gentlemen. I want to understand in the backdrop of the H-1B issues, for the last few years, itself, Infosys has been strengthening its nearshore centers. If you could give me a sense on how it has grown, and at this point in time, how many of your employees are based in nearshore locations, and what is your nearshore strategy going to be, given that now the U.S. has made H-1B norms a lot more stricter now? Also, you talked about the mega deal. If you could give us a sense of which sector it is and what is the AI element embedded in it? And on the fresher hiring, you mentioned 12K. Out of them, what proportion of the freshers are premium talent in the sense that they are already skilled in something and not just vanilla talent? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:21:28So on the mega deal first, I think we've already announced it. It's with U.K. NHS. That's the one you're referring to. We made the announcement just after the close of the quarter. It's a complete transformation of what they're doing. We're supporting it with many new technologies, and AI is very much part of it. It's a huge program in the way that they have trusted us to deliver it. And we work with many different partners to make sure that all of this is delivered effectively for them. But it's just the start. As we go through it, more of that will become public. On the nearshore, so nearshore has been a huge success for us. Many years ago, we started the approach within our strategy of localization in each of our geographies, so in Europe, in Australia, in the U.S. And that has really matured a lot. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:22:37So part of that is we are hiring local people in each of the geographies. And part of that is we are building the nearshore centers, whether those are in the U.S. and around the U.S., like Canada or Mexico or other places in Latin America or in Europe and so on. So that part has really gone extremely well, and we feel quite confident that that will scale even further with all the changes. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:23:08Question on fresher hiring. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:23:09Yeah. So on the freshers, we don't really split out how many of them are higher skills and how many of them are the regular skills. But every fresher will go through the certain trainings, depending on the requirement and depending on the skill set. So we will execute on that. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:23:24Thank you, Veena. The next question is from Rukmini Rao from Fortune India. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:23:30Salil, at the board level, wanted to understand in extreme uncertain conditions where you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. For leaders, what is it sort of what kind of drawing is happening at the boardroom table on how to deal with it? And also, is there some sort of additions to your contingency plans? The other one was you have also disclosed the DOJ investigation happening on H-1B, and you are also internally investigating. Some sense of clarity on what is happening, the kind of inquiry that you're doing within the company. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:24:05And also, on the AI piece, with the partnerships that all of you are all doing with hyperscalers, looking at what happened with Deloitte, in terms of these partnerships, right, and given that these technologies are still so newer, what sort of indemnity comes in these contracts where if something goes wrong with, let's say, any of the hyperscaler platforms that you're working on, I mean, is the entire risk on you, or do they also take up any risk? Because if things go wrong, it can be a huge monetary risk that can be posed to any of the players. Thank you. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:24:41So on the first one, I think we are fortunate with our board to have people, of course, with Nandan there, who are really very experienced in looking at global situations and looking at things over the years. So the board is quite well prepared. The type of environment is different, but equally, the board is well prepared to understand and work with what those uncertainties are. The board looks at different ways and scenarios of what could play out, not from a quarterly business perspective, but much more from how we should look at overall. We, of course, have a risk committee that works extremely well. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:25:26Many of these different scenarios are looked at carefully and evaluated on a regular basis, but with a lot of attention, as I said, with someone like Nandan being on the board and many of the other board members that we have. On the partnerships, so there's a lot of new things happening in AI. And the questions that you ask on liabilities and so on are still not fully clarified from a legal perspective. So we've been quite clear and careful in making sure that we can take on the responsibility for what we have control for. Beyond that, it's difficult to. So whether it's in a discussion with a client or with a partner, that's the sort of guideline that we use. And on the investigation, we have no comments at this stage. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:26:23Thank you, Rukmini. The next question is from Sanjana from the Hindu Business Line. Sanjana BBusiness Reporter at businessline00:26:28Good evening, gentlemen, so just for you to understand, you've made quite a few acquisitions in this calendar year alone, some commentary on the kind of organic moves you are examining and contributions from such moves to the overall growth, and also, some of your peers, as well as you who announced a mega deal in the public sector, some of your peers are also announcing a lot of deals. Do you think that you will be examining this particular sector more closely across your geographies, and also, pertaining to the recent buyback announcement, if you could elaborate on the contours of the announcement, what was the size, sorry, how was the size and the pricing determined, and also some commentary on the outlook for H2 or FY26. Thank you. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:27:23Okay, let me start with those. I think on the public sector first, we've always had a good attention to it. Now we are even more focused on it in different markets. We've done pretty well in the public sector, in the Australian market. We have a pretty decent small business in the U.S. market. With this, we start to expand more in the U.K. market. So we absolutely have a focus on it. We also find public sector is opening up to this sort of change and the sort of capabilities that we bring that they have much more interest to. Of course, in India itself, we do, I think, quite incredible work with the income tax, with the GSTN, and so on. So we have pretty good experience in that, which we can leverage now globally. What was the? Are the inorganic? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:28:22I think our focus is very much on making sure that we have a business that's growing well organically. And then we have a strategic view on what we should look at in terms of acquisitions. So acquisitions are the main driver in that sense of our growth. But where we see something that can add to our capability, either in an industry or in a skill area like a service line or in a geography where we want to expand, those are the ones that we've done, whether it was energy and consulting, whether it was cybersecurity, whether this one, which is focused on digital and AI and cloud. So those are the types of areas we are focused on. And we will continue in that sort of a scale where the primary, of course, is we want to work in the organic sense with our clients. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:29:17Thank you. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:29:17The buyback? Yeah, let me just start, and you can add. So the primary approach, we have a capital return policy, and that guides all of our decision-making on that. So in that, we have a policy where we return 85% of our free cash flow over a five-year period. And then we have in that each year our regular dividend, and then we have other ways of returning. So that's the guideline. And then, Jayesh, you can add more. Jayesh SanghrajkaCFO at Infosys00:29:52Yeah, so within that guideline, if you look at, we are in the second year right now. Last year, we had a very strong cash flow on the back of tax refund that we got. So we had a headroom in terms of returning additional capital back to the shareholders. And as part of that, we looked at various options. And one of that was buyback, which is what we executed. The amount of 18,000 crores at INR 1,800, which we will be executing. At this point in time, we are awaiting shareholder approval. The postal ballot is already out. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:30:28Salil, Ritu again from CNBC. Since we haven't got a very clear response in terms of your outlook for what happens with these H-1B visas, I mean, very simply, to just answer the question, do you think it's viable to continue sending your employees on these visas? Are you going to participate in the next cycle, or is there going to be a significant pullback even in this minority number that you currently have? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:30:50So what I shared earlier, what we have today in the U.S., we have the majority of our people who are not requiring any Infosys sort of immigration support. What we will do in the future will be guided by how we work with our clients, how we scale up what we've been doing there in terms of the discussion we had on nearshore in the local hiring, the localization that we've been working on. So that's the approach that we will take. And we've been working with our clients over the last few weeks to make sure that the service delivery continuity, business continuity remains current. Ritu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV1800:31:40The U.S. company is required to pay that large sum of money to send your employees to the U.S. anymore? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:31:49On the H-1B visa, the response that I have is what I've shared earlier, and that's what we can share. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:31:58Thank you. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:32:04Salil, you also did not come to the new subsidiary in Egypt. Is that anything got to do with the North Africa market, or just broadly wanted to understand why that? And also, Jayesh, the subcontracting cost has gone up. So is that very niche? Is that AI skill sort of guys that you have added to this? Just to understand. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:32:25So the Egypt subsidiary is a particular requirement for a particular project. That is why we had to set up an entity because the client is based in Egypt, and we had to send some people. And that's how we expand across the globe. So that's where it is. Subcontractor cost keeps going up and down depending on the requirement, how we see the demand environment, and how we have the talent that we fulfill. Part of that could be new-age skills like AI skills, etc. Part of that could be the regular demand that we need to meet depending on the project and the location requirements. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:33:00Thank you, Rukmini. Thank you. With that, we sorry. Okay, go ahead, please. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:33:10Hi. Your fact sheet, yes, your voluntary attrition has marginally dropped from the previous quarter. But if you look at it from the previous year, it has increased. In this sort of a market, what is leading to this increase in the voluntary attrition? That's number one. The other thing is about your Hubli campus. You were giving your employees Hubli. You've been giving your employees cash incentives to move to the Hubli campus. But have you directly recruited there? From what I hear, is that Infosys is not directly hiring at the Hubli campus and is going to wait till the next year to get people locally into that campus. If you could tell me a little bit about that. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:33:58Yeah, so in terms of the campus movement, you always need to have certain senior people move to those campuses so that you start meeting the demand requirement. And that's how you incentivize people to move to certain campuses, and then you start building the team below that. So that is where we have made incentives to certain employees, certain of our employees, to move to those campuses, right? There's nothing beyond that. And we have, and we will continue hiring locally in the Hubli as well. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:34:26Started hiring locally? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:34:28We have hired a few people in the Hubli. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:34:30At what seniority? Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:34:31We don't give out numbers by campus, so yeah. Rukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune India00:34:35You shared that you didn't continue around January and April. Salil ParekhCEO at Infosys00:34:38So yeah, we just did it in January and April. We will decide. So it's generally an annual cycle, so we will look at it in future. We have not decided anything for this year at this point. Rishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor Relations at Infosys00:34:48Thank you. With that, we come to the end of this Q&A session and the press conference. We thank our friends from media. Thank you, Salil, and thank you, Jayesh. Before we conclude, please note that the archived webcast of this press conference will be available on the Infosys website and on our YouTube channel later today. Thank you, and please join us for some high tea outside.Read moreParticipantsExecutivesSalil ParekhCEORishi JhunjhunwalaHead of Investor RelationsJayesh SanghrajkaCFOAnalystsRitu SinghDeputy Editor at CNBC-TV18Jas BardiaSenior Correspondent and Reporter at MintVeena ManiSpecial Correspondent at The Times of IndiaSanjana BBusiness Reporter at businesslineJude SannithBureau Chief at ET NowBeena ParmarAssistant Editor at The Economic TimesRukmini RaoConsulting Editor at Fortune IndiaUma KannanJournalist at Deccan HeraldPowered by