History
Tata Consultancy Services was established in 1968 by Tata Sons under the name Tata Computer Systems. Its first contracts were modest: punched card services for its sister company TISCO, now Tata Steel, an Inter-Branch Reconciliation System for the Central Bank of India, and bureau services for the Unit Trust of India.[1]
The 1970s took the firm abroad at a time when few Indian software houses had overseas clients. In 1975 it implemented an electronic depository and trading system called SECOM for the Swiss settlement company SIS SegaInterSettle, then built the System X software for the Canadian Depository System and automated the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. It also partnered with the Swiss firm TKS Teknosoft, which it later acquired.[1]
In 1980 TCS set up the Tata Research Development and Design Centre at Pune, India's first dedicated software research and development centre, and the following year it created the country's first client dedicated offshore development centre, built for the computer maker Tandem.[1]
The company read the millennium bug early. Anticipating the year 2000 problem and the arrival of the euro, TCS built a factory model for Y2K conversion and wrote tools to automate the work for third party developers and clients. It registered its first tagline, Beyond the Obvious, in 1999.[1]
The 2000s turned it into a large public company. TCS entered bioinformatics in 2001 and three years later launched India's first bioinformatics product. In 2003 it became the first Indian information technology company to record one billion dollars of annual revenue, and on 25 August 2004 it listed after an initial public offering. Tata Infotech, until then a separate technology arm of Tata Sons, merged into it in 2005 in a stock swap, and the tagline changed to Experience Certainty.[1]
Through the 2010s TCS kept setting Indian corporate firsts. By 2011 its e-business operations alone were generating more than 500 million dollars a year. On the last trading day of 2011 it overtook Reliance Industries for the highest market capitalisation of any India based company, and in the 2011 to 2012 financial year its annual revenue passed ten billion dollars for the first time. In July 2014 it became the first Indian company to cross five trillion rupees of market capitalisation, and in January 2015 it became the country's most profitable company, ending a 23 year streak held by Reliance Industries.[1]
The most recent decade has been about defending that position while the industry changed shape. TCS passed Accenture in market value in October 2020 and briefly held the title of the world's most valuable information technology company, at one point with a market capitalisation of about 144 billion dollars. In September 2021 it became the first Indian information technology company to touch 200 billion dollars of market capitalisation.[1]
Then the cycle turned. Rising wage costs, softer client spending and the arrival of generative artificial intelligence changed what clients bought. In July 2025 the company said it would shrink its global workforce by about two per cent, roughly 12,000 roles, mostly middle and senior positions, citing a skills mismatch. In October 2025 it set up a subsidiary called HyperVault to build a one gigawatt data centre business in India with capital expenditure of up to seven billion dollars over five to seven years.[1]
The partnership with Anthropic, announced in June 2026, put 50,000 TCS employees onto the Claude family of artificial intelligence models, with the two firms agreeing to build enterprise applications for regulated industries together.[1]
