Tech firms' cash pile

Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and other Indian IT firms have had to take tough questions from investors on the cash pile they have been sitting on for years. This pile produces low returns from investment in bank deposits and the rest. Investors think if the firms have no investment avenues for the pile, they should return much of it to investors. At long last, the tech firms have said yes.

Huge cash piles are not limited to Indian tech firms.Schumpeter points out that the top five tech firms of the world- Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook- are sitting on a net cash (cash minus debt) pile of $330 bn, twice their gross cash flow. This is set to touch $ 680 bn by 2020, three times their cash flow.

One reason for the cash pile is that much of it is stashed away abroad and not brought back to the US in order to avoid tax. But the tax bill by itself does not justify the cash hoard. Another reason is having to making large investments in R&D. The five tech firms spent $100 bn on investment last year. For them not to grow their cash pile, Schumpeter estimates that investment would have to rise to $300 bn. That is a staggering figure by any reckoning:

That is over twice what the global venture-capital industry spends each year. It is 51 times the annual cash burned up by Netflix, Uber and Tesla, three firms famous for being cash hungry. And it is 37 times the average annual amount of cash the five firms have in total spent on acquisitions to gain new technologies and products, such as Facebook’s $19bn purchase of WhatsApp, a messaging service in 2014, or Google’s $3.1bn acquisition of DoubleClick, an advertising firm, in 2007.

What could be the reason then for the cash pile? Schumpeter reckons that uncertainty about future profit could be a factor. The tech firms probably reckon that the cash pile may not grow as much as projected now, given that various threats could emerge. But if they do manage to add on to their cash they may diversity in a big way into cars, media or hardware firms. 

Nilekani and Pai too to return to Infosys?

I had to pinch myself in disbelief when I read this report in IE:

The Street has welcomed NRN's return, confident it would boost employee morale, but analysts realise chances of him being able to turn around Infosys aren't very high. For one, NRN is 67 and has been away from an executive position for seven years, during which the environment has turned more competitive and Infosys weaker. With Nilekani and Pai at his side though, it could be a different story.

Mohandas Pai begins to speak up

Mohandas Pai's resignation from Infosys was a huge news item in the media. Pai's departure will not make a difference to Infosys, certainly not the sort of difference that would cause a sharp drop in the stock price- he's neither a marketing person nor a software person, he was in charge of HRD. I suppose his departure caused news because it was seen as signalling a difference with the board and especially Narayana Murthy over succession planning and it also raised the question whether a company, which is said to be a model of governance, had got its succession planning right.

In his initial remarks, Pai sought to refute any suggestion of differences with the board and insisted he was merely making way for younger people. He also disclaimed any intention of wanting to become CEO himself. The company spokesmen themselves made statements that suggested that Infosys is not your run-of-the mill- company where people at the top have differences over such petty matters as who should be become CEO.

A couple of days later, Pai seems to have thought it necessary to give vent to his feelings. Here's an excerpt from a report in Indian Express:

“What goes against me? Seniority. You are discriminated against because the founders have spent longer years,” Pai told The Indian Express from Bengaluru. “I know the law, so long as the founders are there, professionals who are late entrants will not get a chance.”

....According to Pai, Murthy had, in an interview to a business newspaper, said if there are two very capable people, both fit to take on leadership roles, the one who has served for longer, would be the choice. “I don’t agree... you have to go by the person best suited for leadership over the next five years,” he said.

So, there you have it. The remarks appear to confirm speculation in the media that Pai was not too happy with the choice of S D Shubulal, one of the founders, for the post. In a separate interview with NDTV, Pai also hits out at what he calls the 'conservatism' of the company which, he thinks, has led to others overtaking in the recent past. He also suggests that Infosys might have done a better job of choosing its next CEO:

"When you choose a CEO, you should have a very transparent process and you choose the best person for the job," Pai said, adding, "In corporate India, the whole idea of CEO succession requires more transparency."

--"If left to me I would have drawn a list of people and I would have interviewed them and invited them to come and present to the board what their vision for the future is and I would have looked at their capability and decided for the next 5-10 years who are the people we should back and what they are going to do," he said.

Pai implies that what he has in mind did not happen at Infosys- and he has a point. It's hard to defend a system whereby the founders take turns at becoming CEO; this betrays too much of a closed shop mentality. It could be argued that it turns out that, in a competitive process, one of the founders was the best suited. However, this strains one's credulity- it cannot be that, after NRN, three successive CEOs who were best suited all happened, by a coincidence, to be founders.

Infosys has a board committee looking into CEO selection. Pai's remarks do raise a question mark over how effective this process has been, whether the board has exercised the necessary independence in the matter and made its choice based on a truly global and competitive search.

Satyam sale

The sale of Satyam to Tech Mahindra is a morale booster, never mind the ifs and buts as to whether the buyer can make a success of the acquisition. For once, the print and visual media were willing to acknowledge the role played by the government in preventing a debacle and arranging a rescue.

It's an amazing end when you think of how things would have ended in, say, the US. The moment the fraud came to light, the company would have gone into bankruptcy proceedings and it would have been embroiled in litigation. In a software company, value comes from intangible assets- the people and the brand- so there's little that investors can claim from liquidation and litigation.

The only hope is to turn the company around under new management and wait for the stock prices to revive. Those who filed class action suits in the US may well find that they may be better off waiting for the stock price to rise instead of trying to claim a settlement from the new management.

In making the decision that Satyam was too important to go under and that it could and should be revived, the Indian government was spot on. It also acted swiftly in putting in place a new board and the regulatory authorities helped by creating a fresh set of rules for takeovers in such exceptional cases. (This was wrongly derided by some as being anti-investor, overlooking the fact that we are talking of a company that was on the brink of a collapse that would have washed out investors altogether).

What can we learn from this episode? One is that government may need to intervene in the case of any systemically important institution, not just those in the financial sector. The second lesson- driven home already by the financial crisis- is that 'leave it to the market' can be sheer nonsense in such situations.

'IT industry facing unprecedented crisis'

That was a headline in Indian Express today. The quote was acribed to Nandan Nilekani of Infosys. I read on to see what was meant. Nilkeani is quoted as saying:

....the compounded growth rate was 30 per cent and more and now it is reduced to 20 per cent due to economic slowdown.

Well, I guess that's the sort of 'crisis' most industries would love to have!

I do not, by the way, wish to understate the impact of a slowdown of this magnitude on the jobs market in India, especially the impact on the fresh crop of graduates from engineering colleges this year.