HCL Technologies and the services decade
HCL Technologies was created in the late 1990s out of the group's software, research and development and engineering services work, and it was listed in 1999. The business model was the one that made the Indian information technology industry famous: Indian engineers delivered work for foreign clients from delivery centres in India, charged by the hour or the project, and the client got a quality of service at a fraction of the domestic cost in its own market. Nadar's group entered that market later than Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, but it entered with a hardware and engineering heritage that let it sell work those firms did not do.[1][3]
The differentiator was the kind of work HCLTech took on. Much of the Indian industry began with application development and maintenance and with the outsourcing of back office processes. HCLTech built a large business in infrastructure management, in engineering and research services for manufacturing and telecoms clients, and later in products and platforms. Buying a large share of the engineering services business of the German company SAP and a piece of the software business of IBM added scale in areas that were less commoditised than application maintenance.[1]
The company grew through the 2000s and 2010s to become, by revenue, the third or fourth largest Indian information technology services firm, with a customer list of large global corporations and a staff of more than 220,000 people across India, the United States, Europe and Asia. Its headquarters are in Noida, in the National Capital Region, and its delivery centres are concentrated in the southern and western Indian cities where the industry clusters. The revenue reported for the year to March 2025 was about 13.8 billion dollars.[1][3]
Nadar's own role changed over that period. He was the company's chairman and its public face, and he took part in the succession planning that placed his daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra in the vice chairman's chair in 2018 and then in the chairman's chair in 2020, when she became the first woman to chair a listed Indian information technology company. In July 2021 he stepped down as managing director and C. Vijayakumar, who had been the chief executive, took over for a five year term.[3][4][8]
The succession is worth stating plainly because it is unusual in Indian business. Nadar gave up the executive role while he was healthy and while the business was growing, rather than at the end of his life, and the two roles, chairman of the parent and chairman of the listed company, were divided between father and daughter in a way that was announced in advance and then carried out. By 2026 HCLTech was run by Roshni Nadar Malhotra and C. Vijayakumar, and Nadar remained chairman of HCL and of the Shiv Nadar Foundation.[3][4][8]
