While faster growth looks good for investors, customers are more concerned about what a vendor can offer beyond pure cost savings.

"It's unlikely that faster growth in the past two years help these companies win a lot of new clients. A 5% or 10% difference in growth rates does not make such a big difference to the client. What a client looks at is the capability, the domain expertise and the pricing," said Amneet Singh, vice-president, global sourcing, Everest Group.

For HCL Technologies, the strategy has been about gaining more business by going for total outsourcing contracts - an area where profitability can get affected, according to analysts.

HCL's strategy of focusing on market share gain has yielded good results over the past 18 months as HCL has grown revenues ahead of peers.

"That said, the concomitant deterioration in margins and cash-flows has meant that there isn't enough in the plate at the cash profit level for investors. While we do not think having a lower margin is necessarily a bad thing, it needs to be accompanied by solid revenue growth over an extended period of time (which Cognizant has demonstrated)," CLSA analysts Nimish Joshi, Bhavtosh Vajpayee and Arati Mishra said in their February report to investors.

Source