LTIMindtree, born out of the merger of L&T Infotech and Mindtree in November 2022, has since witnessed nearly two dozen senior-level exits and a fight for the top job, which analysts have attributed to its integration pains.
Brushing aside murmurs around succession planning, calling it “business as usual”, Chatterjee told ET that it is a decision of the board of the company to put the organisation ahead of individuals. There is a substantial leadership bandwidth available at the top and below levels at LTIMindtree, he said.
“From a leadership standpoint, it was very well known that, you know, when two organisations come together, there will be a structural shift. Over a period of time, there may be a bit of a change in terms of leadership,” he said, adding: “We are prepared for it.”
Chatterjee, along with other senior management of LTIMindtree, met investors on Tuesday sharing the company’s vision to become a $10 billion company from the current revenue of $4.3 billion.
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“If you don’t have ambition, there’s no point in running a company. The next target for us is to definitely aim to become a $10 billion (revenue) organisation,” Chatterjee said. “We are now thinking where can we double down the growth. If you look at every other $10 billion organisation, they have a significant platform operations business. We don’t have that much.”LTIMindtree has been investing to build its platform business for the last two years.
“We can cannibalise others’ revenues, because we have nothing to lose. So, you will probably hear some of these announcements hopefully in the next 2-3 weeks. We are also very aggressively focusing on areas where we can truly disrupt things which we have never done before,” Chatterjee added.
Chief operating officer Nachiket Deshpande, a frontrunner to succeed Chatterjee as per media reports, said: “Over the last two years or so, we have been sort of strengthening that foundation in terms of clients, industry segments, service line capabilities, structure and leadership strength. That has given us access such that we have a seat at the table. We are getting invited to the deals.”
The Mumbai-headquartered company won its largest deal, worth more than $240 million, this year.
“I think the biggest change we’ve seen is in the large deals. Our large deal pipeline has gone up significantly, deals about $25 million in size are now over $5 billion worth of pipeline,” said Sudhir Chaturvedi, president and executive board member at LTIMindtree. “Two years prior, we were not playing much in the $100 million-plus deals space. But now we are a significant player. And we put 100-plus fortune 500 accounts in our portfolio, that’s one out of five, which is a great asset to have.”
Chatterjee sees LTIMindtree’s journey towards $10 billion revenue to be “unique” because of the ongoing macroenvironment, change in client demands and focus on efficiency and costs. “If you look at other companies which have gone through a typical $5 billion to $10 billion (revenue) journey, they were relying on fairly large deals, outsourcing, asset takeover deals and market conditions were different. But our journey has to be … will be very unique, because of the tech disruption. And there is no easy dollars.”
Besides the dramatic change with artificial intelligence in the technology landscape pushing clients to look at small deals, he believes the competition is also different now. “Competition is no longer just tier-I and tier-II players, but you have the GCCs (global capability centres),” Chatterjee added.
