One Thing Today in Tech

Microsoft and Google both surprised the street yesterday, beating analysts’ estimates. Google also saw its cloud business turn a profit for the first time since the unit’s launch. Also in this brief, Microsoft’s Anant Maheshwari is named Nasscom chair; WhatsApp can now be used on multiple phones; Xerox to donate PARC to SRI; and Capria Ventures announced the first close of its second fund, which has a target of $100 million, to continue to invest in tech-led startups in the “global south,” the VC firm said in a press release.

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Microsoft, yesterday, beat street expectations, driven by growth in its cloud computing and Office productivity software businesses, and the company said artificial intelligence products were boosting sales, The Guardian reports.

The company also forecast that revenue in its main segments for the current quarter would match or top Wall Street targets.

Meanwhile, Anant Maheshwari, President and CEO of Microsoft India has been named Chairperson of Nasscom, India’s biggest technology lobby, for the current fiscal year that started April 1, The Hindu reports.

Coming back to big tech earnings, sales at Google also rose, unexpectedly, for the Jan-March period, which is the Alphabet company’s fiscal first quarter. Google reported first-quarter revenue of $69.8 billion, up 3 percent year-over-year and above analyst predictions of $68.9 billion.

Google reported cloud revenue of $7.4 billion in Q1 of 2023, up 27.5 percent from $5.8 billion in the year-ago period, and with a $191 million profit, the first since the internet search giant started breaking out cloud earnings, compared with an operating income loss of $706 million a year ago.

WhatsApp, yesterday announced a new much sought-after feature, the Meta unit said in a press release. Following up on last year’s rollout of the ability for users to message on all their devices, WhatsApp has now introduced the ability to use the same WhatsApp account on multiple phones.

Now you can link your phone as one of up to four additional devices, the same as when you link with WhatsApp on web browsers, tablets and desktops, the company said in a post.

This update has started rolling out to users globally and will be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

In once-big-tech news, Xerox is donating its famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to SRI International, a non-profit research and innovation institute. Researchers at the two organizations will collaborate on developing technologies and scientific research, while Xerox said it will focus on its “core, digital and IT services,” Quartz reports.

Roughly 1,000 employees from PARC will join SRI, and contribute to its research areas, which include computer vision, AI and machine learning, and robotics. Both organizations have worked in the innovation space for decades, creating technology that has come to define the Internet age, Quartz notes.

In some venture capital news, Capria Ventures, a US-based VC firm that has backed several Indian startups attempting to solve local problems with world-class tech-based innovations, yesterday announced the first close of its new $100 million fund.

The new fund, Capria Fund II, will focus on investing in 20-25 tech startups in the entrepreneurial hotspots of India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, the firm said in a press release.

Apple opens its second company-owned retail store in India today, in New Delhi. CEO Tim Cook who’s visiting India after seven years, shared a picture on Twitter from a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday and said the company is committed to the country’s tech vision. Also in this brief, JLR is to invest $15.7 billion more in its EV plan over the next five years. Wipro follows LTIMindtree in asking freshers to take additional assessments. And Cognizant is rolling out its third pay hike to eligible staff in 18 months, Times of India reports.

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Apple opens its second company-owned retail store in India today, in New Delhi. CEO Tim Cook who’s visiting India after seven years said the company is committed to growth in the country.

Cook shared a picture on Twitter yesterday evening from a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and wrote “We share your vision of the positive impact technology can make on India’s future — from education and developers to manufacturing and the environment, we’re committed to growing and investing across the country.”

On April 18, Cook opened the company’s long-anticipated first Indian retail store in Mumbai, called Apple BKC, in the Jio World Drive mall, located in the tony Bandra Kurla Complex. He was greeted by hundreds of fans seeking autographs and a handshake.

Apple helped create 100,000 jobs in India over the last two years including via its manufacturing contractors, Times of India reports, citing industry sources. As Apple’s operations in India expand significantly, with its contract manufacturers such as Foxconn International expanding their factories in India, the company expects to help create another 100,000 jobs in India in a shorter period, according to Times of India.

Cook is also said to have requested Modi to ensure that the government’s policies remain stable towards businesses in India. India’s multi-billion-dollar production-linked incentive scheme has attracted several global electronics OEMs and their contract manufacturers to the country.

India’s smartphone exports more than doubled, reaching over $11 billion in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2023, according to trade data examined by the India Cellular and Electronics Association, an industry lobby, and government officials, TechCrunch reported on April 13.

And Apple, for the first time in India, led these exports, making up nearly half the value, at an estimated $5 billion to $5.5 billion, according to the report, which cites industry analysts.

Jaguar Land Rover, the British SUV maker, has announced plans to invest 15 billion pounds (or about $15.7 billion) over the next five years in developing electric vehicles and autonomous driving technologies, to ditch fossil-fuel-guzzling vehicles and catch up with rivals, Bloomberg reports.

JLR, part of India’s Tata Motors, announced a press release yesterday.

In some IT services news, Wipro is following LTIMindtree’s lead in asking fresh recruits to take additional assessment tests in which they need to score at least 60 percent marks to keep their jobs, Times of India reports, citing Nascent IT Employees Senate, a non-profit seeking to organise India’s millions of IT workers.

These recruits were given offer letters last year, and onboarded in March this year, according to the report.

Elon Musk, once a large backer of OpenAI, is planning to launch an artificial intelligence startup of his own, CNBC reports, citing an article in the Financial Times from Friday last that is behind a paywall. The company is called X.ai, according to the Wall Street Journal, which also reported the news, citing a filing in the US state of Nevada. Musk is listed as a director of the new company, according to the journal. Also in this brief, Vivo plans to expand smartphone manufacturing in India, and PC sales are headed for a slump in the country.

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Elon Musk, once a large backer of OpenAI, is planning to launch an artificial intelligence startup of his own, CNBC reports, citing an article in the Financial Times from Friday last that is behind a paywall.

The company is called X.ai, according to the Wall Street Journal, which also reported the news, citing a filing in the US state of Nevada. Musk is listed as a director of the new company, according to the journal.

Musk, the world’s richest person — and CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter — has been building a team of researchers and engineers and has been in conversation with multiple investors, according to the report. He has also reportedly been recruiting from other top AI companies, including Google’s parent Alphabet’s DeepMind, according to CNBC.

Musk has secured thousands of Nvidia GPU processors, according to the report. Such chips are an integral part of the computing power needed to build and train what are called large language models, which underpin AI like GPT. Musk said he was acquiring the processors for his companies in a Twitter Spaces interview with the BBC last week.

Meanwhile, at his rocket company SpaceX, Musk tweeted on Friday that the first flight test of the company’s fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket could be as early as today from a base in Texas after the US Federal Aviation Administration gave the all clear for the test.

Vivo, the third largest smartphone seller in India, is going to set up an additional manufacturing unit in the country as part of its expansion plan, also aiming to step up export plans, The Hindu reports.

Yogendra Sriramula, Head of Brand Strategy at Vivo India, said the company has already invested ₹2,400 crore and an additional ₹1,100 crore will be invested this year in expanding its manufacturing in India, according to The Hindu.

Overall, Vivo is planning an investment of ₹7,500 crore.

Computer shipments in India are headed for a slump, and the demand surge after the Covid pandemic is well and truly over, Mint reports, citing analysts at well-known market researchers.

Data from Gartner shows Indian shipments of laptops and desktops are expected to drop 13.4 percent this calendar year to 12.4 million units from 14.4 million last year. Even though the second half of the year should be better for PC companies, the sales growth seen in the last two years is unlikely to be repeated anytime soon, according to analysts.

Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC India also said PC shipments in India are set to decline this year, according to Mint. A February report from IDC showed total shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations in India grew by only 0.3 percent year-on-year in 2022, including a 28.5 percent drop in Q4 2022.

Tata Consultancy Services kicked off the Indian IT services sector’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings yesterday, reporting that clients in the US, the sector’s biggest market, were holding back on discretionary spending and that an expected pickup from the previous quarter didn’t materialise. Growth was led by a strong performance in the UK, and the company ended the fiscal year 2023 with 6,14,795 employees. Also in this brief, pi Ventures gets a commitment from SIDBI for its next early-stage tech startup fund.

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Tata Consultancy Services kicked off the IT services sector’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings yesterday, reporting that clients in the US, the sector’s biggest market, were holding back on discretionary spending and that an expected pickup from the previous quarter didn’t materialise.

Overall, the company reported revenues rose to $7.195 billion in the three months ended March 31, 2023, representing a 1.7 percent increase over the previous quarter and 7.4 percent growth over the same quarter in the previous fiscal year. The year-on-year growth was 10.4 percent in constant currency.

The company was operating in a “fairly challenging environment,” CEO and MD Rajesh Gopinathan told reporters at a conference in Mumbai yesterday. The sentiment in the US is currently negative, Gopinathan added. The likelihood of a recession in the US remains high, this year and businesses are postponing any expenditure that isn’t immediately necessary.

TCS added more than $10 billion in order wins, during Q4, including a $700-750 million contract from the financial giant Phoenix Group. The deal wins also included a larger proportion of contracts worth $50 million or more versus previous quarters, COO NG Subramaniam added.

TCS added about 820 employees during the quarter to end the year with about 6,15,000 staff. Attrition on a 12-months basis was just over 20 percent, but the reduction from the previous quarter was 4 percent, chief HR officer Milind Lakkad said.

On the tech front, Subramaniam said that conversations with customers are starting and ending with ChatGPT. Customers are asking how TCS is integrating generative AI into its services, and there is keen interest in the area, he said. This isn’t an area that is new to TCS and the company has been working “software that can make software,” for example, for years, he added.

One other update is that Rajesh Gopinathan is handing over the CEO’s role to K Krithivasan on June 1, whereas the transition was originally expected to be completed on Sep. 15. Gopinathan said that this was a planned process wherein the first half of the transition he would be the “primary” and Krithivasan the “shadow” and in the second half, the roles would be reversed. And the second half has been advanced by a couple of weeks.

Suzlon Group yesterday announced a new order win for the development of a 50.4 MW wind power project for Sembcorp’s renewables subsidiary Green Infra Wind Energy Limited.

SimpliContract, a Contract Lifecycle Management platform provider, has raised $3.5 million in series A funding from Emergent Ventures, Kalaari Capital and others.  

pi Ventures, an early-stage VC firm that invests in tech startups, has received a commitment of Rs. 100 crore from the fund of funds management by SIDBI. The fund is on track for the final close over the next two months, in the range of Rs. 675-750 crore.

Apple, after years of anticipation, is finally ready to open its own stores in India. The first two are coming up in Mumbai and New Delhi. They are set to open on April 18 and April 20, respectively. China’s powerful Cyberspace Administration has released draft rules to regulate generative AI products as companies such as Alibaba and Baidu launched their rival products to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, CNBC reports. Also in this brief, CapitalG invests AlphaSense, and HARMAN will open a Chennai software centre soon.

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Apple, revealed a small surprise on Monday, saying it will be opening a second company-owned retail store in India, in Saket, New Delhi. A retail store opening was widely expected in Mumbai, for years, and Apple last week set the date for that as April 18. The store is to be called Apple BKC. The one in New Delhi is set for an April 20 opening.

Apple stores are known for the excruciating details that go into their look and feel, down to the exact placement of every single object in the store. Apple’s marketing machine has also popularised an in-store service known as the genius bar where experienced staff will help customers get their iPhones and other gadgets repaired.

Chinese regulators, yesterday, released draft rules designed to manage how companies develop generative artificial intelligence products, as domestic tech giants begin rolling out products to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, CNBC reports.

On Tuesday, Alibaba unveiled Tongyi Qianwen, its generative AI product, that the e-commerce giant plans to integrate across various services. Baidu, last month also launched its equivalent, Ernie Bot, for testing, according to CNBC.

The CAC’s draft measures lay out the ground rules that generative AI services have to follow, including the type of content these products are allowed to generate. The content needs to reflect the core values of socialism and should not subvert state power, according to the draft rules.

Companies should ensure the data being used to train these AI models will not discriminate against people based on factors like ethnicity, race and gender, the CAC said. They also should not generate false information, the regulator added, according to CNBC.

Google’s holding company Alphabet’s late-stage venture capital arm, CapitalG, has invested $100 million in a corporate data analytics startup AlphaSense, valuing the company at $1.8 billion, according to CNBC.

South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has fined Google 42.1 billion won (~ $32 million) for blocking developers from releasing mobile video games on a Korean competitor platform called One Store, TechCrunch reports.

HARMAN, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, yesterday said it will add a new Automotive Engineering Centre in Chennai, expanding its operations in India. The company expects to recruit 200 employees in the first year of operations of the new centre. Currently, more than a third of HARMAN’s total workforce, at about 10,000 staff, work in India.

Anthill Ventures, a venture capital and speed-scaling ecosystem, yesterday said it had selected five startups from Singapore for the fifth cohort of its Global Innovation Alliance Program.

The fifth edition focuses on mobility, energy, real estate, waste management, water and sanitation, and smart-city applications. The five startups selected for the program are Ailytics, Bizsu, Hydroleap, sepPure, and SwiftIOT.

Worldwide IT spending is projected to touch $4.6 trillion in 2023, increasing by 5.5 percent over 2022, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, widely seen as the top IT market forecaster advising enterprise CIOs. While the devices segment is expected to contract the most among the various categories, the IT services segment is now expected to grow faster. Gartner forecasts IT services spending in 2023 to increase by 9.1 percent, compared with its January forecast of 5.5 percent. Capital markets analysts in India are hoping for “front-ended” guidance from Infosys.

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Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.6 trillion in 2023, an increase of 5.5 percent from 2022, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, widely seen as the top IT market researcher advising enterprise CIOs on their tech spending.

Despite continued global economic turbulence, all regions worldwide are projected to have positive IT spending growth in 2023, Gartner said in a press release on April 6.

The latest forecast is more than double the 2.4 percent estimate from January, and also higher than the 5.1 percent projection Gartner had made six months ago.

The IT services segment is now expected to grow even faster. Gartner forecasts IT services spending in 2023 to increase by 9.1 percent over 2022, compared with its January forecast of 5.5 percent and its October 2022 estimate of 7.9 percent growth.

This is good news for India’s IT services companies ahead of their fiscal fourth quarter and full-year results expected later this week.

“Macroeconomic headwinds are not slowing digital transformation,” said John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “IT spending will remain strong, even as many countries are projected to have near-flat gross domestic product (GDP) growth and high inflation in 2023.”

Prioritization will be critical as CIOs look to optimize spend while using digital technology to transform their businesses’ value proposition, revenue and client interactions, the analyst notes.

The IT services segment will continue its growth trajectory through 2024, largely driven by the infrastructure-as-a-service market, which is projected to reach over 30 percent growth this year. For the first time, price is a key driver of increased spend for cloud services segments, rather than just increased usage, according to Gartner.

India’s top two IT services companies are expected to report their earnings this week. Tata Consultancy Services will report its Q4 and FY23 results on April 12. Infosys will report its results on April 13.

For the fourth quarter, which is the January to March 2023 period, TCS will likely lead its peers, analysts at Kotak Securities write in their latest IT preview report, dated March 31.

The analysts expect TCS to report fiscal Q4 revenue growth of 1.1 percent versus the previous quarter, and an 11.2 percent increase over the same period a year earlier, in constant currency terms, which eliminates the impact of currency exchange rate fluctuations.

India yesterday notified changes to its information technology rules that now require all intermediaries – such as social media platform providers and internet services providers – to rely on a government-backed fact check unit concerning any content related to “government business,” according to an official statement. Also in this brief, Q1 of calendar 2023 saw startup funding continue to fall, according to data from Tracxn.

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India yesterday notified changes to its information technology rules that now require all intermediaries – such as social media platform providers and internet services providers – to rely on a government-backed fact check unit for any content related to “government business,” according to an official statement.

The new rules called the IT Amendment Rules, 2023, first proposed in January, now “make it obligatory on the intermediaries to not publish, share or host fake, false or misleading information in respect of any business of the Central Government,” the statement reads.

Such information “will be identified by the notified Fact Check Unit of the Central Government,” according to the statement. The statement also says that “the existing IT rules already required the intermediaries to make reasonable efforts to not host, publish or share any information which is patently false and untrue or misleading in nature.”

These changes have drawn criticism from human rights campaigners such as the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation.

The new rules “directly and negatively impact online freedom of speech and the right to receive information,” the foundation said in a post on its website.

The amendments notified yesterday also included tougher rules on online gaming, especially in regulating online betting. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for IT said in the government statement: “Online gaming is certainly a huge opportunity for India and Young Indians. We see the Indian online gaming ecosystem expand and grow into a multi-billion-dollar industry and be an important catalyst to India’s One trillion-dollar Digital economy goal by 2025-26, with very clear restrictions on online wagering and betting.”

In startup funding news, startups in India raised a total of $1.2 billion in funding in March compared with $598 million in February, according to data from the private markets intelligence provider Tracxn.

There were 12 startup acquisitions last month, including Knowledge Lens and Sportido. March saw 87 funding rounds compared with 67 in February. The top funding rounds in March were Lenskart’s Series-J round, in which it raised $500 million, PhonePe’s Series D, $200 million investment and Mintifi’s Series D round in which the supply chain fintech provider raised $110 million, according to Tracxn.

There were 58 Seed rounds, 19 Series A rounds, two Series B rounds, and eight Series C+ rounds.

FinTech, Retail, and Enterprise Applications were the top-performing sectors in Q1 2023. There were no new unicorns created in Q1 of 2023, compared with 14 in Q1 of 2022. Q1 of 2023 also saw three companies - Robu Labs, Mars Capital, and Homesfy announce their plans to go public.

Capillary Technologies, one of India’s first-generation software-as-a-service companies, earlier this week, announced its second US acquisition as part of a strategy to step up its operations in the world’s biggest technology market. Speciale Invest, a Chennai VC firm known for backing deep-tech startups, has raised a fund aimed at series A or higher. And Infosys wins a contract that extends its 15-year relationship with LexisNexis. Also in this brief, Google reveals an AI supercomputer that it says is faster than competing systems from Nvidia, CNBC reports.

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Google, yesterday, published details about one of its artificial intelligence supercomputers, saying it is faster and more efficient than competing systems from Nvidia, the chipmaker known for its AI processors, CNBC reports.

While Nvidia dominates the market for AI model training and deployment, with over 90 percent market share, Google has been designing and deploying AI chips called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, since 2016, according to CNBC.

AI models and products such as Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT — powered by Nvidia’s A100 chips — require a lot of computers and thousands of processors to work together to train models, with the computers running non-stop for weeks or months, CNBC explains.

Google said that it had built a system with over 4,000 TPUs joined with custom components designed to run and train AI models. This supercomputer, called TPU v4, is “1.2x–1.7x faster and uses 1.3x–1.9x less power than the Nvidia A100,” Google’s researchers wrote.

Infosys, yesterday, announced that it has won a new order, extending its collaboration with LexisNexis, a data and analytics company, to provide information services across its range of content, enterprise, and product applications.

Infosys will provide IT services in multiple business domains that include LexisNexis’s global content systems, global business systems and product development. Infosys will provide application maintenance and support, application development and validation, life cycle upgrades, application modernization, and content modernization.

Infosys will also provide strategic consultancy for LexisNexis’ downstream, discretionary investments. The Bengaluru-based IT giant didn’t provide any financial details. Infosys will report its fiscal fourth-quarter and annual earnings results on April 13.

Capillary Technologies, one of India’s first-generation software-as-a-service companies, earlier this week, announced its second US acquisition as part of a strategy to step up its operations in the world’s biggest technology market.

Bengaluru-based Capillary, which provides a customer loyalty and engagement SaaS platform, has acquired Texas-based Brierley+Partners, which offers software solutions in loyalty, strategy, and execution to retailers.

Capillary Technologies has grown 3.5x times in the US since the acquisition of Persuade in 2021, and this acquisition consolidates its position as a platform of choice for loyalty technologies, the company said in a press release.

In more startup news, Speciale Invest, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in deep science and enterprise technologies, yesterday, announced the launch of a new fund aimed at growth-stage ventures, the Speciale Invest Growth Fund I.

The new fund has an initial investment of Rs. 100 crore and has received approval from SEBI to fund startups at series A and above, according to a press release.

India’s Skyroot Aerospace, yesterday announced it had conducted a long-duration test of a 3D-printed cryogenic engine, firing it for 200 seconds – an important milestone in developing the private space venture’s higher payload capacity rockets. The test also yielded vital data for advancing the company’s use of LNG – a greener alternative to the more widely used fuels today, the company said in a press release. Also in this brief, PhonePe, a Walmart group company in Bengaluru, yesterday launched Pincode, an app built on top of India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce.

Notes:

India’s Skyroot Aerospace, yesterday announced it had conducted a long-duration test of a 3D-printed cryogenic engine, firing it for 200 seconds – an important milestone in developing the private space venture’s higher payload capacity rockets.

The endurance test of the engine, named 'Dhawan-II,' in honour of the late Satish Dhawan, a mathematician and aerospace engineer widely seen as a central figure in the development of India’s space programme, demonstrated “impressive performance results,” Skyroot said in a press release.

The test was carried out at the Solar Industries propulsion test facility in Nagpur, Maharashtra, using Skyroot’s indigenously developed mobile cryogenic engine test pad.

This achievement follows the November 2022 launch of Vikram – S, which made Skyroot the first Indian private company to successfully send a rocket into space.

“The successful test of Dhawan-II is a landmark achievement for Skyroot and the Indian private space sector,” Skyroot’s Co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana, said in the press release.

The Dhawan-II engine advances the capabilities of Skyroot's first privately developed fully-cryogenic rocket engine, the 1.0 kN thrust Dhawan – I, which was successfully test-fired in November 2021.

“This is a major milestone for our cryogenic propulsion programme, which will enhance the payload capacity of the Vikram series of space launch vehicles making them more modular to meet wider customer requirements,” Naga Bharath Daka, Co-founder and COO of Skyroot, added.

The liquid and cryogenic propulsion programme at Skyroot is led by a former senior ISRO scientist, V. Gnanagandhi.

Skyroot's cryogenic rocket engines use two high-performance rocket propellants, Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and Liquid Oxygen (LoX), which require cryogenic temperatures (below -150° Celsius) for storage and operation.

The technology being developed by Skyroot is currently mastered by only a handful of countries globally, the company says. LNG, which is more than 90 percent methane, and LoX, are considered green-burning propellants. They are environmentally friendly compared with the solid, semi-cryogenic and hypergolic propellants which are currently widely used in the rocket industry.

Skyroot’s next space launch is that of the Vikram-I rocket, planned for the end of this year. The latest ground test takes Skyroot one step closer to making Vikram – II, an upgraded version of Vikram-I which uses a cryogenic upper-stage, launch-ready by next year.

This engine development was partly supported by NITI Ayog’s ANIC-ARISE programme which promotes technologies including the use of green rocket propellants. Skyroot was founded in 2018 and the company has raised $68 million in funding so far, from investors including GIC, the founders of Greenko Group and angel investor Mukesh Bansal.

Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest technology services and consulting company, announced a surprise change at the top yesterday. CEO Rajesh Gopinathan has resigned to “pursue his other interests,” and K Krithivasan, another company veteran will take over in the coming months, the Mumbai-listed IT giant told the stock exchanges after the markets closed. Also in this brief, Xoriant, an engineering services provider in the US, gets a new chief executive; and the UK bans TikTok on government devices.

Notes:

Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT services and consulting company, announced a surprise change at the top yesterday. CEO Rajesh Gopinathan has resigned, and K Krithivasan, another company veteran will take over in the coming months, the Mumbai-listed IT giant told the stock exchanges after the markets closed.

“After a stellar career of over 22 years with Tata Consultancy Services, and a successful stint as Managing Director and CEO during the last six years, Rajesh Gopinathan has decided to step down from the company to pursue his other interests,” the company said in a press release.

The company’s board of directors has accepted the decision, and Gopinathan will continue with the company till Sep. 15, “to provide transition and support to his successor,” the company said. TCS named Krithivasan as the CEO designate with effect from March 16. He will be appointed as the managing director and CEO in the next financial year, which starts April 1.

Gopinathan “has laid the foundation for the next phase of TCS’ growth with significant investments in cloud, agile and automation to help clients accelerate their transformation,” N Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons and TCS, said in the release.

“I have been harbouring a few ideas on what I want to do in the next phase of my life,” Gopinathan said in the press release. “After deep reflection and in discussion with the Chairman and the Board, we decided that the end of this fiscal year is a good time for me to step aside and pursue those interests,” he said.

Gopinathan said the company had added $10 billion in incremental revenues on his watch and its market capitalization had increased by more than $70 billion through the six years that he was chief executive. He was elevated to the top job in 2016 when his boss and mentor Chandrasekaran was tapped to run the Tata Group amid a corporate feud between the Tatas and the late Cyrus Mistry who was ousted as chairman of Tata Sons that year.

CEO-designate Krithi Krithivasan is presently President and Global Head of the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance Business Group at Tata Consultancy Services, the company’s biggest unit. He joined TCS in 1989. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of TCS Iberoamerica, TCS Ireland and the supervisory board of TCS Technology Solutions AG.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Madras and a master’s degree in industrial and management Engineering from IIT Kanpur.

Elsewhere, Xoriant, an engineering services provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Sukamal Banerjee was named as the new CEO. Banerjee, a former HCL Technologies executive, takes over from founder and CEO Girish Gaitonde.

And in some big tech news, the UK, yesterday, banned the use of Chinese-owned video app TikTok on government devices, with immediate effect, according to a press statement.