Shiv Nadar on Scale Economics

The Foundation notes that HCL is one of the few global IT companies founded in the 1970s still in existence — a longevity claim that places HCL alongside IBM and Apple, and that the Foundation uses to anchor Nadar's credibility as a long-cycle institution-builder.

The Foundation reports that as of March 2026 Nadar had invested roughly US$1.83 billion through it, directly impacting around 57,000 students and alumni across six institutions covering the full education spectrum — a number that quantifies the scale of his philanthropic pivot from commercial IT into institution-building.

The Foundation states that HCLTech today is a US$14.8 billion global organisation with over 223,000 professionals operating from 60 countries — confirming the Forbes figures and reinforcing the scale at which Nadar's pivots toward engineering R&D and joint-venture-led growth were executed.

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.

Forbes notes that HCL Technologies hires high-school graduates and trains them on the job, a recruitment practice that broadens the talent funnel beyond engineering campuses and ties workforce capacity to training throughput rather than degree supply.

To attract talent into an attic-office in 1976, Nadar offered monthly salaries of INR 2,000 — more than Citibank India then paid — explicitly because each hire added five percent to overhead and the company could not afford to mis-hire; he sourced five IIM-Calcutta graduates and judged them unusually intensely given the marginal cost of each headcount addition.

Reflecting on growth, Nadar noted it took HCL 13 years to reach INR 100 crore in computer revenues (1989) and roughly another 10 years to reach INR 1,000 crore, before accelerating to INR 15,000 crore by 2006 — a J-curve he attributes to the post-liberalisation environment and HCL's accumulated engineering credibility.