Industry Odisha Bureau, Sep 07: Sudhir Singh has a number in mind, and he wants to get there ahead of schedule. Coforge’s CEO is telling anyone who’ll listen that the company will blow past $5 billion in revenue well before its original FY30 deadline and crucially, he’s framing this as an organic story first, an acquisition story second. That ordering matters more than it might seem.
The numbers behind the confidence
FY26 closed at $1.87 billion, up 29% year-on-year a genuinely strong print by any IT services benchmark. Strip out the effect of the Encora acquisition, though, and Kotak Institutional Equities puts constant-currency organic growth at 19.4%. That’s the number Singh actually cares about, because it’s the one that doesn’t depend on the next deal closing. Travel, transportation and hospitality clients now nearly a quarter of revenue did a lot of the heavy lifting, alongside banking and financial services, still the company’s largest vertical.
Here’s what’s worth noting: Singh openly admitted Coforge “could have grown even more.” That’s an unusual thing for a CEO to say on the record mid-victory-lap, and it reads less like modesty and more like a signal that management sees room to push harder perhaps a subtle acknowledgment that competitors moving via M&A are setting a faster pace.
The AI deflation question and why Singh’s answer is more nuanced than it sounds
The elephant in every IT services boardroom right now is whether AI shrinks the addressable revenue pool by collapsing billable hours. Singh’s position is that deflation is real, but contained he locates it specifically within managed services, not the broader book. That’s a meaningfully narrower claim than “AI isn’t a threat,” and it’s worth reading it that way rather than as blanket dismissal.
His counter-argument is that new categories data pipelines, context engineering, remediation engineering are opening up faster than old ones are shrinking. This is essentially a bet that the IT services market isn’t a fixed pie being sliced differently, but an expanding one where the winners are whoever moves fastest to make AI operationally real for enterprise clients. It’s a defensible thesis, but it’s also unproven at scale every large IT vendor is currently making some version of this same argument, so Coforge’s differentiation will come down to execution, not messaging.
Deal discipline as a moat
One number stands out: 19 of Coforge’s 21 large deals last year were proactive rather than RFP-driven. In an industry where AI tools are lowering the barrier to entry and rivals are cutting margins to win competitive bids, this is arguably a more durable advantage than any specific AI product. Proactive deals are relationship-and-trust-driven; RFP deals are price wars by design. If Coforge can keep that ratio, pricing pressure becomes a competitor problem more than a Coforge problem.
The competitive squeeze
Persistent Systems’ pending acquisition of Nagarro complicates Coforge’s positioning a combined entity near $2.9 billion would leapfrog Coforge’s current $2.5 billion in-year target, at least on headline revenue. Singh declined to engage with this directly, which is itself telling: reacting publicly to a rival’s M&A move usually does more to validate the rival’s strategy than to counter it.
Margins and governance: the less glamorous risks
Operating margins rose 370 basis points to 14.4% solid improvement, though still well behind TCS’s roughly 24.5% and marginally behind LTIMindtree and Mphasis. And governance has become a genuine friction point: shareholders initially rejected special board rights tied to the Encora deal (forcing a rapid climbdown within 14 hours) and later voted down OP Bhatt’s board reappointment. Two shareholder setbacks in under a year is unusual for a top-ten IT firm, and it suggests investor patience with board-level decisions is thinner than the growth numbers alone would imply.
The bigger picture
What emerges is a company making a coherent but high-stakes wager: that demand creation from AI will outrun AI-driven price compression, that organic growth can outpace peers who are buying scale instead, and that deal discipline can insulate margins even as the industry cuts prices to compete. The FY26 numbers support the story so far. Whether Coforge hits $5 billion ahead of FY30 will likely hinge less on any single metric here and more on whether “supply-constrained, not demand-constrained” AI services actually materialize at the scale Singh is projecting a bet the whole industry is making, just with different chips on the table.
