Things are looking up in the world's back office. Accenture, the IT and consultancy firm, lifted operating profit by 10 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter; bookings from financial services clients are at record levels. In India, Infosys, the biggest outsourcer by market capitalisation, is giving guidance for top-line growth of about 20 per cent in the year to March. Analysts, undeterred by the outsourcing of their own jobs, are fans: Accenture, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, India's industry leader on revenues, each carries a single sell recommendation to 20-40 buys.
Outsourcing is an easy industry to like. Theoretically, it rides the economic downturns when banks, governments and other clients may find it cheaper to outsource than maintain their own bloated back offices. The cost base, being mainly people, is flexible. The marketplace, while heavily tilted towards the US, is global. And the formula works. From 1996 to 2004, Infosys was increasing earnings at an average clip of 60 per cent a year; in the subsequent five years, growth was still running at 36 per cent. The Indian trio, including Wipro, have generated total returns of 60-100 per cent in the past year.
But, as Infosys's disappointing numbers demonstrated yesterday, even the gilded can stumble. First-quarter operating profit dropped on a sequential basis; this follows a year where income growth decelerated to a mere 4 per cent. Increasing tentacles into budget-slashing nations such as the US and UK suggest slimmer margins. Tata Consultancy, for example, won the contract to administer the UK's new personal pension accounts, worth maybe ￡600m, when other bidders could not make the numbers stack up.