Shiv Nadar on Outsourcing Strategy

HCL started as a hardware outfit manufacturing India's first indigenous computers before evolving into a comprehensive software-services organisation — a hardware-to-services pivot the Foundation positions as a continuous engineering-and-research identity rather than a defensive retreat from commoditised hardware.

The Foundation attributes HCL's large engineering-and-R&D division to Nadar's 'pioneering spirit and belief in engineering and research' — positioning R&D as the engine of HCL's differentiation rather than labour-arbitrage services, the more common Indian IT narrative.

Forbes reports HCL Technologies' annual revenue at roughly US$13.8 billion, placing it among India's largest software-services providers and employing about 223,000 people across 60 countries — a scale built by Nadar over 48 years of continuous operation from the 1970s computing era into the cloud-and-AI era.

Nadar's first international foray came in 1980 through Far East Computers in Singapore, a vehicle to sell IT hardware abroad; it clocked roughly INR 1 million in revenue in its maiden year and established the template of pairing Indian engineering talent with foreign demand — a model the entire Indian IT industry would later scale.

Nadar was openly critical of the headcount-obsessed model of Indian IT — comparing firms that proudly announce ever-larger employee counts to a football bouncing between Cognizant, HCL and Infosys — and argued that body-shopping without meaningful customer contribution would not survive, presaging the shift toward deeper, fewer customer relationships.

Nadar told Wharton that HCL wanted to reduce its customer count from roughly 500 to 300 over a couple of years — explicitly the opposite of growth-at-all-costs — because without deep engagement, he said, HCL would be just a 'project company' that customers could drop without noticing.