It’s so strange that Large Cap funds always protected portfolio during various collapses and now small and multi cap are protecting the portfolio.
Do we need to move on from IT stocks for time being to protect capital?
The Coming Collapse of Indian IT: Real Industry Insights
1. IT contributed 7.3% to India’s GDP in FY25
2. 1.5M engineering graduates every year; 83% without jobs
3. TCS/Infosys were in denial mode: "There is still time; AI will augment, not replace humans."
INDUSTRY INSIGHTS:
3 Assumptions of Indian IT Industry Gone Wrong
Assumption 1: “AI will augment people”
REALITY:
a. “Augmentation” has collapsed into “substitution.” AI agents are doing a lot of heavy lifting already and replacing human coders on a mass scale.
b. Productivity gains are real and measured – up to 60% for all repetitive work, boilerplate code, testing, and fixing which TCS/Infosys teams were doing.
c. For example, “manual testing” headcount is down by 70% in banking & insurance, and L1/L2 support bots are handling 80% of support tickets in mature implementations.
Lesson for Indian IT: AI is not stopping at “assisting” or “augmenting” humans. It keeps learning until humans become the bottleneck.
Assumption 2: “Clients will want humans”
REALITY:
a. Clients do not want humans. They want quality, speed, lower cost, and above all, predictability (AI does not fall sick, does not want holidays, does not have burnouts, and does not make mistakes).
b. Fortune 500 clients are building internal AI-enabled engineering teams that are 50% smaller, but deliver faster & better than outsourced teams. Moreover, AI tools provide audit trails, explainability, and logs where humans are inconsistent.
c. Result: Vendor contracts of TCS, Infosys, Wipro and others are now being rewritten to reduce headcount, tie fees to outcomes (instead of billing hours), and penalize (not reward) manual effort.
Lesson for Indian IT: Clients only have one motive: profit maximization. They don’t care whether humans or AI delivers it.
Assumption 3: “Transition to AI will be gradual”
REALITY:
a. Transition to AI is occurring 10X faster than what happened with cloud. Cloud needed big server shifts and systems redesign. But with AI, no change in physical infrastructure is required. AI tools run in existing cloud. Just sign in, plug, and play.
b. Cloud rollouts were top-down (big planning, pilots, governance, approvals). AI is spreading bottom-up: one developer or a small team sees a quick win, tells others, and it spreads enterprise-wide at lightning speed. AI pilot projects are converting to production in weeks, not years.
c. Individual engineers are adopting AI “without permission.” It means developers are using free/cheap AI tools personally to deliver solutions. This creates “shadow AI” (unofficial AI) with obvious and immediate value for the industry.
Lesson for Indian IT: Technology adoption does not move in a linear manner when the costs of switching to new technology collapse. Change appears slow at first, but once the curve tips, entire teams and companies disappear at once.
Systemic Cause of the Downfall of Indian IT: Cultural Complacency
Why Indian IT organizations were unable to move at AI speed even when the enemy was at the doorstep? What looks like “slow moving” from outside is actually a self-reinforcing system of incentives that makes change impossible inside Indian IT companies.
Cash Cow Protection
a. Indian IT giants likes TCS and Infosys generate over 70 to 80% of their sales revenue from top 200 accounts (many of these clients are 10-20 years old).
b. Any change within the organization that risks destabilizing these accounts is treated as a threat. As a result, the top management prioritizes contract renewal over reinvention.
c. Account leaders are rewarded not for innovation, but for ensuring no disruption to delivery, headcount, and predictable billing. If you attempt to innovate in this environment, it is seen as a threat to stability.
Innovation is Career-Negative
a. Business unit heads in top Indian IT companies are trained for large program delivery. Their expertise lies in managing thousands of people, not building platforms or products. If they adopt AI to dismantle labour arbitrage models, it would invalidate their own skills that made them powerful.
b. The organization does not incentivize innovation. There is no upside for a senior leader in an Indian IT firm to destroy/disrupt their own revenue engine and invest in long-term strategies. To the contrary, their compensation and bonuses are linked to quarterly margin and quarterly growth.
c. Inside Indian IT companies, AI tools are generally limited to “assistive” use. Scaling AI is delayed until clients demand it. Why? Because the traditional IT services model is: Revenue = People x Rate x Time. Any AI model that reduces “people” or “time” directly hurts topline numbers.
Product Thinking Threatens Stock Prices
a. Product thinking goes against the stock price-driven quarterly economics that defines Indian IT companies. Product building requires large, upfront R&D investments, high-end teams, and long payoff horizons.
b. By design, IT service companies in India focus on low capital risk, predictable margins, and immediate billing (instant cash flows). Stock markets love that.
c. From board level to middle management, there is no disruption mindset, which is critical for product development. Why? Because disruption will hurt margins in the short run, and thus the stock prices, dividends, and bonuses will be impacted.
Just like Kodak and Nokia in the olden days, Indian IT companies have reached a dead end because their internal culture punishes the very behaviours (innovation and failure tolerance) that survival now requires.
ENDQUOTE:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike replied. “Gradually, then suddenly.” – Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rise” (1926)
@arabicatrader
@Moneypurseadv
Hi Sai garu. I wanted to understand the behaviour of KPI Green energy stock.
I follow daily money show everyday and seen many times it has won very good orders and also posted good numbers. Despite all these why the stock is falling everytime?
🚨 England lost Ashes in Australia
Nowadays every team is struggling to win the test series in Australia
Meanwhile, Captain Ajinkya Rahane won us the 2020-21 BGT in Australia with net bowlers and without Virat Kohli, Shami,Bumrah, Ashwin and Jadeja 🫡🔥