For three decades, India’s presence in today’s global economy has been shaped primarily through coding. The country’s most famous companies are not oil firms or financial institutions but rather software export firms such as Infosys, TCS and Wipro.
These three firms turned Bangalore and Hyderabad into the world’s back offices. Although the period of defining India through these leading companies is not over yet, it is starting to pass. Infosys has been removed from the group of India’s ten most valuable companies after having lost over ₹2 trillion during its FY26 market cap decline, a loss that is better characterised as a structural indicator of how India’s economy has outgrown the industry that defined it.
This structural transition can be viewed through India’s current rankings where Reliance Industries dominates the top of the chart at approximately 19 to 21 trillion rupees in market capitalization, followed by HDFC Bank, Bharti Airtel, ICICI Bank and State Bank of India.
Collectively, these five most valuable Indian companies represent the largest number of firms in these sectors; energy, telecommunications and banking. Additionally, if you look at the ten most valuable publicly traded India companies today, four of them are in the banking and financial services category (HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI and Bajaj Finance).
Banking and financial services have become key components of the domestic credit growth story which drives the overall economic growth story for India.
By figuring in the ability of Reliance to diversify across oil refining, retailing, the Jio telecom empire and green energy business (oil refining, retailing and telecommunications only); no comparable single asset IT corporation has been successful in matching Reliance’s sheer resilience through its operating diversification.
According to statistics, the sector's revenue is more than ₹10 lakh crore and 3.8 lakh workers.
TCS (a subsidiary of the TATA Group) is still India’s largest IT company; however, like the rest of the work force in this sector, TCS has undergone a restructuring. In Q2 FY26, TCS reduced its employee count from 613,069 in June 2025, down to 593,314 employees in September 2025.
This constitutes approximately 19,775 (19,529; about 2% reduction) employees, or approximately 66% of those initially planned to be laid off during the first quarter of the fiscal year. Similar reductions occurred with Infosys and Wipro. All three companies maintained their revenue.
For example, in Q1 FY26, TCS reported an increase in revenue of 1.3% (from ₹62,103 crore to ₹63,437 crore; net income increased 5.9%, or approximately ₹1,200 crore). Likewise, Infosys experienced revenue growth (7.5%; ₹42,279 crore) and HCL experienced the largest revenue increase of the three companies, growing by 8.1% (approximate estimate is ₹42,700 crore.)
The revelation here is that, even though IT companies are holding onto their revenue, there has been a significant amount of headcount reduction as a result of the increased utilization of automation and generative artificial intelligence (AI), replacing the work performed by previously employed engineers.
HCL, which had previously appeared resilient, was negatively impacted when providing its cautious forward guidance, leading to a sizeable decrease in its share value of approximately $4.5 billion, following the company's warning to investors, which triggered a broad-based sell-off in the sector.
During the same period, Tech Mahindra has been losing IT staff, while both Wipro and Infosys are experiencing structural issues that cannot be addressed through their quarterly results; specifically, an end to the linear model for hiring that has provided much of the profit in the Indian outsourcing industry since the 1990’s.
These job reductions are an indication of a major shift away from a focus on financial health and toward a longer-term strategy to position their companies for success in the future by developing their talent and delivery methods to utilize new technology.
Business Standard Companies in this sector, then, are using the term ‘future-proofing’ to describe how they are automating their businesses.
The global IT services market was worth $1.85 trillion in 2024, projected to reach $2.03 trillion in 2025 and beyond Skyquestt — and to date, this growth has gone toward new capabilities instead of the traditional headcount-based outsourcing. In January 2026,
Accenture announced plans to invest $3 billion to expand its data and AI capabilities and hiring 25,000 additional employees and building six innovation centres across the U.S. Mordor Intelligence Similarly, in January 2026, IBM won $1.2 billion, seven-year contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs to migrate 9 million patient records into a new FHIR-compliant hybrid cloud environment.
Both moves are examples of a shift in the IT industry where funding that was traditionally associated with hiring people has changed to funding associated with managing the delivery of results rather than people.In 2025, Infosys filed for 340 artificial intelligence patents to compete in this area; cognizant acquired a zero-trust cybersecurity consultancy for $480 million at the end of December 2025.
According to Mordor Intelligence "no Indian IT company is standing still — they are running to keep up with a business model that no longer rewards workforce size."
In India, the industries that benefit most from this evolution are those that derive income from consumers rather than clients. Bajaj Finance's market capitalisation reached over ₹5 trillion in 2025 to become one of the most valuable companies in the country. Bajaj built its success on reaching more than 80 million customers using a data-based model for lending to regular consumers for the purchase of durable goods, personal loans, home mortgages, and digital payment methods.
Similarly, Larsen & Toubro is positioned to continue to benefit from the multi-year capital investment in infrastructure by the central government, which will provide more than ₹11 trillion of capital investment in the Union Budget.
As the buildout of physical infrastructure accelerates in India, L&T's valuation has continued to rise. Because these companies provide necessary goods/service to consumers, their businesses do not depend on the discretionary IT budgets of London or New York for revenue.
A week that showed the fragility of many of the largest corporates was a week when ₹2 trillion of market value was lost from seven out of the ten largest public companies in the country within five days.
Most of this loss in value was associated with TCS and Reliance; therefore, it was a clear example of how all of the largest capitalised businesses are vulnerable to global interest rate cycles, geopolitical uncertainty and changes in investor risk appetite.
In 2024, the total market capitalisation of India's equity market reached more than $4 trillion, becoming the fourth largest in the world. This is an important milestone. However, size does not confer immunity.
The market capitalisation of Infosys is just over ₹5 trillion, and it has nearly 50 operating locations; therefore, it is still a global-scale company. Its initial exit from the ten largest companies (by market capitalisation) does not mean it has disappeared.
However, it has fallen in rank and represents something much larger than quarterly performance or one company — it marks the end of an era when fortunes were primarily dictated by one industry that contributed to a country's economic identity. India's business future will be written by banking institutions, fibre optic networks, renewable energy infrastructure, and the spending of millions of new consumers entering the middle class.
While the code will have continuing importance in the business world, it will no longer be the dominant factor.
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