I think till February we were in a good shape. Then as the further intensified discussion on trade policies and all happened, there is a certain amount of uncertainty that has set in with our customers. The good news for me is that while there is uncertainty, some programs are being paused, some decisions have been delayed, but we are not seeing major project cancellations. This quarter, amidst all this, we had one of the best order books, almost $12.2 billion as a TCV that we have booked. So I am as optimistic as I was in January maybe not, but I am not pessimistic either. I still believe things will settle down in the short term, and customer certainty will be there, and customers will start spending towards technology transformation. But that is my hope and expectation; I am not giving confirmation that that is what is going to happen. The street has been very nervous with respect to IT companies, and I think they have been the most hit in the last quarter, especially Q4. And tariffs are not on services; it is a derivative that is hitting the IT companies. When you speak to your client, they would have done the IT spend for the year at the beginning of the year. Has the outlook changed on the IT spends as we speak? As I said, there have not been major budget cuts or project cancellations, but it also varies; the mood has been different in different industries. For instance, fortunately in banking financial services, which is our biggest sector, demand has been quite resilient, and we continue to discuss newer projects, transformation engagements, application technology modernization initiatives. Those discussions are going on. Same as in, let's say, if you take the aerospace industry, sorry, aircraft industry, it is quite strong. But in auto there is a weakness. If you take consumer business, definitely there is a weakness because if the tariffs kick in in a significant way, the cost of goods will go up, and then they expect a reduction in volume and maybe a profit. Similarly, we do find some of the airline companies expecting reduced travel, and they have issued some profit warnings. So it has been a mixed bag. Some industries are not too concerned or at least not taking any drastic steps, but industries like consumer are worried. So there has been a significant pause in project startups or delays, but again, even there, we have not seen any cancellations of projects.
Mhm. Normally I would have asked this as a first question on the earnings because it's the Q4 numbers, but the top of the mind is the tariff. On the earnings front, earnings for Q4 were pretty much in line with street expectations. They expected a slight dip in revenue, margins were supposed to be flat, but you came down by 30 basis points. Is the India business the sole reason why the revenues dipped? Because BSL revenues would have come down for you. Definitely India business had contributed to that.
What we are quite happy about is that all the major markets grew. I don't think in this year we had a situation where all three major markets grew; however small it may be, they all grew. Even amongst our business verticals, the non-India part of the business, BFSI grew, we had growth in energy resources, we had growth in communications, even coms had a very marginal but positive growth. So overall, I would say the global business has shown positive growth. India definitely, because it's not something that we did not expect, the project has come to successful completion, which we are happy about. Fully ramped down? Or is there still some part of it? There will be, I think there will be at least a couple of quarters of extended time.
Okay, on the BFSI part, how do you see BFSI? Because now we'll have to break it up. BFSI, how is it doing in the US and how is it doing in Europe? Both are a different story to tell actually.
But actually at this time in BFSI, when I speak to my clients or teams in North America or Europe, there is no major difference. Okay. Within BFSI, the way I would split is banking, financial services, and insurance. Insurance has shown some softness, particularly in North America, but banking and financial services have been quite resilient. We see projects right from cost optimization to technology debt reduction and of course new transformation projects, aging, GenAI, and all those things. So BFSI has been quite resilient for us. Even the order book in BFSI has been $4 billion in this quarter, which is probably one of the highest for them out of $12.2 billion.
Yes. And is there a margin pressure coming in? Because in Q4, I was looking at your BFSI IT margins. They've been slightly down, I think 100 basis points if I'm not wrong.
I won't be able to comment on the sectoral margin, but overall, are clients negotiating hard on margin? No. This quarter, there are three components. While BSNL as it came down provided a margin tailwind, we did have headwinds in terms of inter-employee interventions. In Q4, between the entire year, if you look, we promoted one in six of our employees, or 100,000 employees were promoted in FY25. So there was some impact of increments and interventions in Q4. We had some one-off non-employee related expenses in terms of marketing expense, some amount of CSR expense kicking in. Otherwise, I don't think there is any pricing pressure. Realization actually in Q4 ticked up marginally. There was no reduction in realization.
