India: After a long and curious match between the two, Tata Consultancy Services has ultimately won. Now the leader of the IT game is not Infosys but TCS. It took the TCS five quarters to outdo Infosys. The parameters of comparison have been the hours billed to the clients and better employee retention. Analysts now assign Tata higher valuation over Infosys.

“With such continued outperformance, TCS has consolidated its position as the new leader of the IT sector, a position which was claimed by Infosys till now,” IT analysts Vijay Gautam and Krupa B Shah noted in their Friday report. The difference in absolute profits which was negligible two years ago has reached to as high as 38 percent.

Infosys has for pretty long been the default choice of fund managers for their IT stocks portfolio. But now this position is at risk of loss.

“We believe Infosys is losing its ‘MUST OWN’ status in the investor’s portfolio by coming up with negative surprises more regularly than ever before,” noted Pratik Gandhi of IDBI Capital.
JP Morgan analysts attribute TCS’s success to its organizational reforms some time back.

TCS reaches over 26 percent profit margin this quarter to match Infosys for the first time.

TCS has employee utilization of about 83 percent as compared to 73 percent of Infosys. The average age of the employee is an optimal 28.