COVID-19 unlikely to have major impact on our business : HCL

New Delhi, March 30 (IANS) IT major HCL Technologies on Monday said that the coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to have a major impact on its business as its exposure to the severely-affected sectors is not significant.

“While the impact on this quarter’s numbers is yet to be quantified, we don’t expect it to be significant. Our exposure to the more impacted verticals is not significant. Booking during this quarter has largely been on track as significant part of closures happened in January,” the company said in a statement.

It said that its business model is a healthy mix of recurring product revenues, managed services and discretionary spend led professional services. From a vertical perspective, our exposure to verticals like oil and gas, travel and hospitality, high-end retail is in single digits.

“We recognize our investments in risk management systems and processes over the last several years are helping us to minimize the short-term impact and to be adequately prepared for the medium term, if it gets worse. We are also confident our business model will help us to emerge stronger in the longer term as it has been built for resilience during tough times,” it said.

The company said it has been monitoring the COVID-19 outbreak since late January and had invoked its Business Continuity Plan and Risk Management Framework quite early to minimise the impact on its employees and clients.

“The situation arising out of this outbreak and its rapid spread across the world is unprecedented and is extremely dynamic. The economic impact is visible with varying degrees of intensity across multiple countries where we operate,” said the company.

HCL said that it has a “well-defined and structured” pandemic policy in place which is resilient, pragmatic and accords paramount importance to employee safety and health and client commitments.

As of today, 76 per cent of its India-based employees and 92 per cent of its employees in other geographies are enabled to work from home.

“It is noteworthy that we have not witnessed any outages or major disruption in operations with this newer format of work from home delivery,” it added.

–IANS

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