Financial News
Wipro Ltd's (WIT) CEO Abidali Neemuchwala on Q4 2016 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
As a reminder, all participants' lines will be in the listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Aravind Viswanathan. Thank you and over to you, sir. We will begin the call with business highlights and overview by Abid, the Chief Executive Officer and Member of the Board, followed by the financial overview by our CFO, Jatin Dalal. Afterwards, the operator will open the bridge for Q&A with our management team. Before Abid starts, let me draw your attention to the fact that during this call, we may make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Private Securities Litigation Reform Act 1995. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are associated with uncertainties and risks, which may cause the actual results to differ materially from those expected. The uncertainties and risk factors are being explained in our detailed filings with the SEC. Wipro does not undertake any obligation to update the forward-looking statements to reflect events and circumstances after the date of filing thereof. The conference call will be archived and the transcript will be available on our website. Ladies and gentlemen, let me now hand it over to Mr. Abid. Today is the first opportunity for me to interact with all of you since I've taken over as the Chief Executive Officer of Wipro, and it's a special moment for me. While I will speak about the performance of our full quarter and the full fiscal year, I thought I will take this opportunity to begin by speaking about our ambition, our strategy and how we are going to execute this strategy. Since I got announced within two days, I was able to define and announce my structure and I had already preselected my leadership team which I announced on 6th of January, effective February 1. Over the past 80 days after I have taken over as CEO, I've had the opportunity to go around the globe and meet about 70 of our top 100 clients. And both with my leadership team and with the customers, I've had the opportunity to validate the strategy that we have been working on and this gives me a high level of confidence on the relevance of our overall strategy. Our ambition is to double our revenues to 15 billion by fiscal 2020 with a 23% operating margin.
Alphabet Inc (GOOG) Q1 2016 Earnings Preview: Big Profits Despite EU Challenges, Unprofitable Moonshots
It's a good time to be Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), the parent company of Google. The holding company that owns Google, YouTube and Android -- as well as so-called moonshots like self-driving cars, the home-networking division Nest and Google Fiber -- is expected to turn in healthy first-quarter results on Thursday, driven by its dominant position in online search and display advertising. On Wednesday, the European Commission is expected to formally charge Google for favoring its own apps and services on its Android mobile operating system, which powers more than 80 percent of the world's smartphones. That will be the latest in a decade of entanglements with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic; Google also got some bad press in Britain earlier this year for having paid just 185 million in taxes over the past decade. Also confronting Google -- and the rest of the tech industry -- is how to manage government and law enforcement requests for information.
Yahoo keeps world guessing about its future: analysis
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer delivers the keynote address at the Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference in San Francisco on Feb. 18, 2016. SAN FRANCISCO -- The news of the day was about Yahoo's latest quarterly earnings, but inquiring minds were riveted on bidding for the company's core Internet business. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer on Tuesday didn't tell curious analysts and the media much, making it clear she wouldn't detail the initial bids for the embattled company or how Yahoo's business trajectory beyond this year impacts that process. But if first quarter results are any indication, the future isn't bright. Yahoo reported 859 million in adjusted revenue, down 17% from 1.04 billion in 2015, and compared to 1.09 billion in 2014.
Intel: Facing A Real Threat
Shares of Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) have been trading along the 100-day moving average after bouncing off the low in February, as analysts raised concerns about PC and notebook sales during the first-quarter 2016. Intel will report its first-quarter 2016 earnings after the market close on April 19. Investors will be closely watching the results from the Client Computing Group, or CCG, Intel's mobile and PC business, and the Data Center Group, or DCG, as about 88.9% of their revenues last year came from these two groups. Less than a week ahead of the earnings report, Pacific Crest warned it expects Intel to report first-quarter earnings below the midpoint of guidance, and to lower its guidance for the full-year as well. Wall Street opinions about Intel's data center outlook are mixed, according to Barron's.
Oracle has acquired Israeli Big Data startup Crosswise for 50m
Oracle Corp. has acquired Israeli machine-learning Big Data startup Crosswise, Inc. The price of the acquisition was not officially disclosed but is believed to be 50 million according to local media. Founded in 2013, Crosswise provides an authoritative consumer device map to ad tech vendors, consumer brands, and premium publishers. The company's platform combines data science, Big Data and machine learning, to identify which PCs, phones, tablets, digital TVs and other connected devices are being used by individual consumers; by applying advanced data science and proprietary machine-learning techniques to this data, Crosswise constructs a new probabilistic Device Map matching multiple devices to individual users in an accurate, scalable and high-quality manner. According to Crosswise, the benefits in being able to provide this data is that it allows marketers and premium publishers to deliver advertising, personalization and analytics across different sorts of devices.
Technology is becoming the lifeblood of business: Jayajyoti Sengupta
Singapore: Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., a US-based information technology (IT) firm with most of its employees working out of India, expects its business growth in the Asia-Pacific region to outpace the company average this year, maintaining the trend seen in recent years, Jayajyoti Sengupta, president and Asia-Pacific head, said in an interview. Automation, which includes robots, machine learning and artificial intelligence, will be among the new frontiers for Cognizant, as rote and repetitive processes become "digital, instrumented, analyzed and intelligent", he said. Cognizant has said it expects its revenue growth to slow to between 10% and 14.3% for the calendar year 2016. How do you see the situation in the Asia-Pacific? It would be pertinent to note that Cognizant's growth of 21% in calendar 2015 included revenues from the acquisition of TriZetto.
Infosys : Q4 net up 3.8 pct, FY17 dollar revenue growth up 4-Traders
"It is our endeavor to create great value for every business through solutions built on our artificial intelligence technology and open, cloud platforms, to have Infoscions amplified by intelligent technology, to bring purposeful innovation to life, and in that sense, we are still very much at the beginning of this journey," he added.
What's a CFO's Biggest Fear, and How can Machine Learning help?
Bob, CFO of ABC Inc is about to get on an earnings call after just reporting a 20% miss on earnings due to slower revenue growth than forecasted. Company ABC's stock price is plummeting, down 25% in extended hour trading. The board is furious and investors demand answers on the discrepancies. Inaccurate revenue forecast remains one of the biggest risks for CFOs. In a recent study, more than 50% of companies feel their pipeline forecast is only about 50% accurate.
Happy 40th birthday, Apple. Welcome to middle age
Apple won't be blowing its billions on Porsches (well, except for the rumors it's working on a self-driving car), but the birthday seems fitting for a company in a more, shall we call it, mature stage of life. Apple's no longer the brash, hippie company that introduced the Macintosh computer in 1984 as part of its mission to create "bicycles for the mind." And it isn't the struggling organization that was on the verge of bankruptcy when Steve Jobs returned to run it in 1997 and urged people to "Think Different." It's not even the Apple of the early 2000s, when it introduced one blockbuster product after another -- the iPod, iTunes store, iPhone, iPad and even the Apple retail store. The Apple of today is a grown-up company with hundreds of millions of customers actively using more than a billion of its products.
Cognitive technologies in the technology sector: From science fiction vision to real-world value
Artificial intelligence is certainly no longer considered science fiction--or a source of expensive R&D efforts with unmet potential--by major players in the technology sector.1 Instead, we are in the midst of a real-world paradigm shift: the final stages of a decades-long transition from the scientific discipline known as artificial intelligence (and its various sub-disciplines) into an array of applied cognitive technologies made more widely available through innovative enterprise architectures unique to the business culture of the technology sector. The technology sector's interest in these technologies (figure 1)2 has exploded in the last several years. Networking companies, semiconductor manufacturers, hardware companies, IT providers, software providers, Internet players--just about every technology subsector has seen a substantial upsurge of activity in this space. In fact, the race to invest in artificial intelligence has been described as "the latest Silicon Valley arms race."3 Since 2012, there have been 100 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) within the technology sector involving cognitive technology companies, products, and services.4 And this rush of M&A activity is not the only sign of the industry's interest. Many capabilities that were only just emerging a few years ago are now essentially mature and becoming "democratized" and more readily available for business applications. As a result, leading companies are using cognitive technologies to enhance their existing products and services, as well as to open up new markets. What is interesting is that the assertive actions of the sector's leaders do not mirror the wholesale adoption of these technologies across the industry. Many technology sector companies have yet to turn their attention to how cognitive technologies are changing their sector or how they--or their competitors--may be able to implement these technologies in their strategy or operations.