Message from CEO

Dear Shareholders,

I am incredibly excited to share my first communication to you in my new role.

As you would have read from my colleagues and from the financial statements we present here, 2015-16 was a momentous year for us. Your company delivered yet another year of strong growth, powered by our strategic focus on three plans – world class capabilities in digital and managed services, domain knowledge and deeper mining of client relationships. We led the industry on growth again in 2015-16.

Our continued focus on attracting and developing talent played a key part in achieving our results. Your Board of Directors and senior leadership team continue to make this a priority and are actively engaged in this process all through the year. One area within talent management we are particularly focused on is increasing the gender and cultural diversity within Mindtree. I am very pleased to report that we now have 50 women in senior management roles, and 28% across all levels. In addition, we have people from 48 nationalities working in Mindtree at present.

Another example of our focus on talent management is our new Global Learning Center. We need to develop engineers of tomorrow for a hyper-connected world and our response was to build a world-class learning environment called Mindtree Kalinga. Nestled across 20 acres, this pristine campus borders a reserve forest in the progressive city of Bhubaneswar, India. Everything in this facility was imagined to excite all those who pass through the facility. Since the Center became operational in March of 2015, over 1400 new Mindtree Minds have graduated and been deployed in projects across the company. Designed with the mindset ‘Engineering, Business and Social’ this campus is a learning lab for interdisciplinary teams to solve real world problems. Mindtree Kalinga also has a Software Delivery Center that focuses on building expertise in niche technologies for our insurance offerings, serving global clients. With over $25 million of investments in Mindtree Kalinga, we will turn out world class talent that will wow our clients and shape the future of Mindtree.

We are also investing in strengthening our technology and domain capabilities. For example, within the Consumer Packaged Goods industry, we have strong capabilities in several key business processes such as Trade Promotion Management, Dealer Management Systems and Supply Chain Management. We have similar exciting stories in Hi-tech, Travel, Hospitality, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance. On the technology front, we have highly referenceable, globally relevant capabilities that help enterprises migrate to the Cloud, as well as many other innovative solutions. These have helped us win prestigious awards from partners like Microsoft and SAP. Our strengths in some of the traditional services like Infrastructure Management and Testing are also getting glowing reviews by leading industry analysts, many of whom rank us as leaders or strong challengers in these areas. We aspire for global leadership status in emerging technology areas like Digital, Artificial Intelligence, Agile Programming and Automation. We believe we are well poised to achieve this with the investments we have made.

We intend to fund some of these investments through better execution to unlock efficiencies. Towards that goal, this year we embarked on an enterprise-wide Delivery and Operations Transformation program which applies LEAN principles to software delivery. In addition, we launched an operational efficiency improvement track which looks at improving utilization and reducing costs in various areas. We are executing these initiatives in parallel and in multiple phases. The program will cover all business units and locations in the next 24 months. This ambitious transformation program has the potential to significantly enhance productivity of our people as well as strengthen our competitiveness in the marketplace.

At Mindtree, we have always taken our responsibility to the community seriously. During the year, we participated in programs across many of the regions where we operate. These included empowering rag pickers in many cities across India through technology; supporting education in primary schools and high school students wishing to pursue medical education; helping children with disabilities; and many other socially significant initiatives. We measure the impact of these programs carefully and I am very pleased to report that all these programs met or exceeded our expectations. We also realize that we can be a force multiplier for the various not-for-profit organizations we partner with and hosted them at our office during the year. This generated a lot of ideas and energized the teams to do more to benefit the communities we operate in. We also partnered with some of our large customers on social initiatives of their choice. In addition, we recognize our responsibility to safeguard our planet for future generations. Elsewhere in this annual report, you will find our Business Responsibility Report explaining the ecological initiatives we have embarked on to minimize our carbon footprint, save water, and more.

2016-17 starts on a positive note overall and presents many new possibilities. It will be an interesting year for Mindtree from many angles. Amongst other upcoming milestones, in March 2017, we will mark 10 years since our IPO. As we see today, the business environment does present an unclear picture. Further, economic and political uncertainties affect many countries where we operate. However, we believe these challenges will only help us become stronger. Building on the strong growth momentum we have generated over the last few years, strong financials, and outstanding client relationships, we are confident that we will deliver strong growth with some margin improvements in FY 2016-17.

Finally, on behalf of all Mindtree Minds, I would like to thank you for your steadfast support and encouragement. We are conscious of our role as custodians of the resources you have placed at our disposal as well as your trust. For our business to be relevant over the long term, we need to deliver value to you as well as to the communities we operate in. Sustainable value creation is foremost in our minds in the way we run our business. We commit to you that we will make Mindtree a memorable company through our core values: collaborative spirit, unrelenting dedication, and expert thinking.

I look forward to interacting with many of you at our forthcoming annual meeting of shareholders and at other occasions through the year.

With best regards,

Rostow Ravanan
CEO and Managing Director