Accenture Q3 numbers show road's still bumpy for IT companies

Time of India

24-06-2025

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Global IT major Accenture's financials for the third quarter of FY2025 announced on Friday suggested continued demand slowdown for the $280 billion Indian software outsourcing business amid weakened deal bookings. This was driven by an elevated level of uncertainty in calendar year 2025 (CY25) versus CY24, analysts and brokerage firms noted in their reports. Accenture follows a September to August fiscal year.The Ireland-headquartered giant technology services company reported an 8% growth from a year-ago March-May quarter to $17.7 billion helped by the consulting business and an increase in financial services and health & public service segments.However, Accenture's quarterly new bookings declined for the second consecutive quarter with a steeper drop at 6% (year-on-year) YoY compared to a fall of 3% in the previous quarter.Analysts saw the soft outsourcing deal wins – consulting down by 2.2% YoY and outsourcing deals weaker by 9.8% - as dampening for Indian IT players.'Bookings momentum slowed down, including in generative AI (GenAI)…Demand has not changed significantly, and the environment is not conducive for healthy deal wins,' said a Kotak Institutional Equities report in a note after the Accenture results.Despite an incremental $2.15 billion to bookings YoY in 9MFY25 from GenAI, overall bookings still declined by $1.75 billion compared to 9MFY24.Its headcount also fell by 10,337 from the previous quarter, the highest-ever quarterly drop for Accenture.'For the Indian counterpart, the slowdown in outsourcing bookings might further intensify conversion challenges on selective pockets, especially the tariff-induced verticals. While we expect BFS should continue its growth momentum in the subsequent quarters,' said brokerage firm Prabhudas Liladhar in its report.Shares in Accenture plunged 6.8% on Friday. On Monday, the Indian BSE and NSE IT sector index, which accounts for share trading of IT companies, declined 1.5% each. Shares of top companies including Infosys and HCLTech fell over 2% while peers TCS and Wipro dropped more than 1% at the day's close on the BSE.Mid-tier firms Coforge , Persistent and KPIT Technologies also faced the brunt of the overall weaker market.Since January, the BSE IT index has lost over 13%. However, most analysts expect AI, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and healthcare likely to be high-traction demand areas.Accenture's book-to-bill ratio remained healthy at 1.2x, which provides reasonable growth visibility over coming quarters, said a sectoral report by Nuvama (formerly Edelweiss) Institutional Equities. 'Over the medium-to-long term, we expect recovery in the macro environment to accelerate enterprise tech spending,' it said.Accenture's fourth quarter revenue guidance was moderate at 1-5% growth to $17.0–$17.6 billion. Full year revenue guidance was narrowed at the lower end from earlier estimate of 5–7% to from 6–7% with a 0.5% negative impact of currency movement. Of this, organic growth is projected in the lower single digit at 3–4%.Notably, the quarter included two months—April and May—of heightened uncertainty following the US government's tariffs. This impacted decision making and discretionary spending further due to high-cost pressure on most corporates.Accenture's healthy revenue growth was overshadowed by slightly lower outsourcing growth, slower overall deal wins, excessive headcount reduction (10,400), indicating lower demand going forward, as per an ICICI Securities report. It added there was no revision to the upper end through FY25 revenue guidance, a trend from the last two years.