More sectors adopt digital channels: TCS

MUMBAI/BENGALURU: The emergence of Covid-19 has resulted in many sectors adopting digital channels, said TCS chairman N Chandrasekaran at the company’s first-ever virtual annual shareholder meeting on Thursday.
The options which were “secondary” and “nice-to-have” have become primary channels and in some instances, the “only channels”, said Chandrasekaran, emphasising that this was the transformation the company spoke about five years ago when it said “default is digital”.
TCS is the first Indian listed company to hold its annual shareholder interaction over video conferencing after the government relaxed rules because of human mobility restrictions triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Otherwise, in a normal, non-virus year, investors and non-investors travel from different parts of the city and elsewhere to the Birla Matoshree auditorium in south Mumbai to attend TCS’s shareholder meeting.
On Thursday, 1,283 people from Ahmedabad to Boston to Coimbatore logged in from their homes to see and hear Chandrasekaran’s response to their questions. The chairman, on his part, made TCS House, the company HQ, the venue to address shareholders.
“The sharp shift in consumer preferences has now forced enterprises to significantly accelerate their digital transformation initiatives,” said Chandrasekaran, who was flanked by TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan and company secretary Rajendra Moholkar.
Though the pandemic reversed the positive momentum the company saw in the first half of fiscal 2020, Chandrasekaran said that digital technologies will play a more enhanced role in the post-Covid world as sectors adapt to the new normal, which would also help TCS to bounce back. Whatever an enterprise does physically will have to be “reimagined”, said the chairman, responding to one of the 27 speakers’ queries.
The shareholder interaction, conducted over NSDL’s online platform, lasted 2 hours and 45 minutes, but lacked the repartee between the management and shareholders, which otherwise is seen during the physical meetings.
Many entities will be hosting their annual shareholder meetings over video conferencing in the coming days. An awaited AGM is of RIL, which sees the biggest congregation of stock market participants at the Birla Matoshree auditorium. Since RIL has not announced its AGM date, it remains to be seen if RIL will follow TCS in conducting its shareholder interaction online.