Mumbai: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has recorded revenue and earnings growth in line with market anticipations for the second quarter ended September 30, 2007 on better pricing, profit limits and continued hiring.

The Software major has declared 22.8 per cent growth in its net earning, which stood at Rs 1,251.60 crore from Rs 1,018.68 crore in the corresponding period of the last year. Revenues for the said period (Q2) climbed 25.4 per cent at Rs. 5,639.73 crore, as against Rs. 4,494.83 crore, last year. The operating profit was at Rs. 1,478.69 crore (Rs. 1,254.36 crore).

The company offered Rs. 8.56 crore for interest, Rs 204.45 crores for tax and Rs 134.53 crore for depreciation. Other income stood at Rs 122.09 crores. For the first six months ended September 2007, the net profit zoomed 29 per cent at Rs. 2,455 crore on 25.3 per cent higher total revenues of Rs. 10,843 crore.

While addressing the media persons, S. Ramadorai, CEO and Managing Director, TCS said, “We have underlined our leadership position by earning revenues of $2.7 billion in the first half of this financial year by accelerating our growth rate and improving our profitability in the second quarter. Our strategic investments in new services like consulting, infrastructure and platform-based BPO as well as new markets are helping accelerate growth and diversify our revenue base, thereby reinforcing our full service capability.”

S. Mahalingam, CFO, TCS, said, “Our focus remains on twin pillars of growth and profitability. In the second quarter, we have absorbed the impact of the rupee appreciation and improved our profitability. We remain confident that our hedging programme and cost management levers will help us expand margins during the rest of the year.”

The company’s operating profit margin was at 24.85 per cent (24.95 per cent)

According to Mr. Mahalingam, “The company is as we said earlier; we are well on way to sustaining operating profit margins.”

N.Chandrasekaran, COO, TCS said, “This has been a landmark quarter with our full services strategy coming of age and more than 50 per cent of the revenue in the second quarter coming from the non-ADM(Application Development and Maintenance) services including consulting, BPO and infrastructure services, which are all growing at double digit rates.”

In terms of dollar, TCS’ earnings came up 10.8 per cent in the second quarter driven by a robust increase in banking and financial services, telecommunication and manufacturing verticals.

During the second quarter, TCS has added up more than 12,000 employees and remains on target to meet up its twelve-monthly hiring plans and turned the first Indian IT company to cross the one lakh employee-mark.

TCS’ attrition rate remained steady at 11.5 per cent generally with 10.9 per cent in IT services and 17.9 per cent in BPO.