Supreme Court's verdict on the multi-crore scam may have a huge hit on IT and BPO companies too. On Thursday, the Supreme Court cancelled 122 licences of telecom firms, which has shocked the IT/BPO sector. Both Indian and multi-national IT firms like Wipro, Tech Mahindra and IBM, besides business process firms such as Firstsource, Intelenet and Aegis, have signed multi-million dollar deals with telecom firms including Uninor, Etisalat DB, Videocon and Idea, said a report in Business Standard.

Wipro had signed an estimated $500-600 million outsourcing deal with Uninor in 2009. Similarly, Tech Mahindra had signed an outsourcing deal from Etisalat, with a revenue estimate of $400-500 million. MNC firm IBM, which has a $1 billion outsourcing deal with Bharti-Airtel, had also bagged a $200-million deal from Videocon-led Datacom Solutions, said the report.

Tech Mahindra, when contacted, said it was aware of the matter and were closely monitoring the development and at this point in time they would not be able to offer any comment. Tech Mahindra had won deals from Etisalat and Sistema Shyam. An estimated 500 employees manage the Etisalat deal at Tech Mahindra.

Firstsource that provides services to telcos like Airtel, Idea and Vodafone says the BPO firm does work with a few telecom players in India. Yet, the circle that they work has not been impacted by the Supreme Court verdict. There is only one circle where one of our customer has been impacted, but that will have a marginal impact on them. The company’s telecom unit employs close to 12,000 people.

Aegis says it cannot comment on individual clients. The overall impact of the judgement will be very minimal, amounting to under one per cent of their domestic business, according to the spokesperson of the Essar Group technology and BPO arm. The court has asked the government to take steps within a month on the recommendations given by the telecom regulator, saying spectrum would be allocated through auctions within four months. This time-frame, experts say, will be lend a breathing space to the operators to act on the order.

(Source: Business Standard)