Subscribe Sign In EDITORS' PICK|Sep 14, 2020,05:40pm EDT|18,368 views Roshni Nadar Malhotra Of HCL Technologies Looks To Ride The Digitalization Wave Megha BahreeContributor Asia Listen to article Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Chairperson of HCL Technologies. COURTESY HCL In mid-July, Roshni Nadar Malhotra took charge as chairperson of HCL Technologies from her billionaire father Shiv Nadar, who had just turned 75. Nadar Malhotra, 38 and the only child of HCL’s founder, has paid her dues before this long-planned succession. She’s been an executive with the Noida, India-based company for 12 years, of which the last two were as vice chairperson. While in that post, she backed HCL’s $1.8 billion purchase from IBM of a portfolio of its products. The acquisition, which closed last year, was the biggest by value in the company’s 29-year history. Reinforcing the family continuity, Shiv Nadar will remain active in the company as managing director and keep his long-held title of chief strategy officer. “He’s really not going anywhere,” says Nadar Malhotra, speaking by video from her home—her first interview in the new role. Despite the company’s size, Nadar Malhotra wants it to behave like a startup. “You always have to keep agile, and quite hungry and entrepreneurial,” she says. The company, she says, has a long history of “plunging into areas unknown.” The IT services giant is facing some pandemic-induced headwinds. HCL’s first quarter results, released the same day that Nadar Malhotra was appointed chairperson, showed that revenues grew only 1% year-on-year to 178 billion rupees ($2.4 billion). Profits of 29 billion rupees were down 7.4% quarter-on-quarter. The company cautioned that quarterly revenue growth going forward might only be around 2% per quarter, a far cry from its usually strong growth. The pandemic has also meant that some 90% of HCL’s 150,000 staff worldwide are working from home, including Nadar Malhotra (with occasional trips to the office). The company expects at least half of its staff will work from home over the next 18 months. Some two-thirds of the company’s revenues come from the U.S. market, which still leads the world in the number of Covid-19 cases—and the company’s CEO is based in New York. One issue with muted effect on HCL, however, is the temporary freeze in the U.S. on issuing new H-1B work visas (used by many Indian expat tech workers), as two-thirds of HCL’s U.S. staff are local hires. MORE FOR YOU China Detains Fallen HNA Ex-Billionaire Chairman Ahead Of Airline Restructuring Vote Nasdaq Listing Of Freshworks Creates Windfall For Indian Founder And Hundreds Of Employees Ninja Van Becomes Singapore’s Newest Unicorn After Raising $578 Million From Alibaba, B Capital Despite these challenges, HCL stands to benefit longer term from the enormous digitalization wave unleashed by Covid-19. Now as chairperson, Nadar Malhotra expects HCL to build on that trend. “There’s been an accelerated emphasis on technology and how businesses are going to need it now to thrive and even differentiate themselves,” she says. “There’s a lot more focus on digitalization and that’s something which uniquely has opened up a few opportunities.” The purchase of the IBM assets is instructive. While most Indian IT majors have some products in their portfolios, HCL is making a big bet on them with this deal. With the purchase, HCL launched a new division called HCL Software, which now has 2,000 customers. “We see tremendous potential for creating compelling ‘as-a-service’ offerings by combining these products with our traditional IT and next gen service,” said CEO C. Vijayakumar in a press release when the deal closed last July. Roshni Nadar Malhotra with her father, Shiv Nadar, Founder of HCL, at a press conference in Delhi in ... [+] HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES Nadar Malhotra also sees opportunities in developing more partnerships. “We’re always partnering, always carving out, acquiring. It’s just in our DNA,” she says. For example, in May, HCL expanded its two-year-old partnership with U.S. tech giant Broadcom to provide enterprise security consulting in addition to other software services. Technology was not Nadar Malhotra’s first love. After graduating with an undergraduate degree in radio, television and film from Northwestern University in 2003, she worked as a TV news producer at Sky News in the U.K. Three years later she went back to the U.S. for an M.B.A. at her alma mater, where she specialized in social enterprise. In 2008, Nadar Malhotra returned home and the next year became CEO of HCL Corp., the holding company through which the Nadars own their stakes in listed HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. The HCL group at the time was one of India’s major tech firms, along with Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, companies that created tech billionaires such as Azim Premji and N.R. Narayana Murthy. We’re always partnering, always carving out, acquiring. It’s just in our DNA. Roshni Nadar Malhotra Today HCL operates in 49 countries and has a market capitalization of about $26 billion. It ranks as No. 3 among India’s largest tech firms by market cap and sales. Nadar Malhotra is the first woman to chair a listed tech firm in India—and one of a handful of female chairpersons in the male-dominated global tech industry. The rise of HCL and its peers was in step with India’s emergence as a global IT services hub. Her father Shiv Nadar, who started HCL as a maker of calculators and microprocessors with seven friends in 1976, pivoted in 1991 into IT-led services, including software, R&D and BPO, with HCL Technologies. The company’s move into managing IT infrastructure some 15 years ago attracted large clients, cementing its position in the global tech industry. Initially, Nadar Malhotra says, she avoided any role at the group’s flagship HCL Technologies. She spent her first year overseeing the education initiatives of Shiv Nadar Foundation, the family’s philanthropic arm, and set up two all-expenses-paid boarding schools for poor, rural students in Uttar Pradesh state, where HCL is headquartered. SHIV: AMIT VERMA/FORBES INDIA In 2013, Nadar Malhotra was appointed to the board of HCL Technologies, and five years later made its vice chairperson. She says those positions provided her with “great exposure,” not only to her father, but also to the company’s working culture and executive talent, including past and present CEOs. She has also drawn from the expertise of board members including Harvard Business School’s senior associate dean, Srikant Datar, and University of California, Berkeley’s former dean of engineering, S. Shankar Sastry. As an only child, she says, she spent much time with her father, absorbing how he built and ran HCL. A banker who knows father and daughter but who asked not to be named says Nadar Malhotra learned the ropes from her father. “If you had to tick 10 boxes to see if she meets the [chairperson] criteria, she would tick most of them,” he says. “She’s very smart, driven, intelligent, young, aspirational and has fire in her belly.” While the family has majority control of HCL Technologies, Nadar Malhotra insists “we are a board-driven company.” She sits on all of the board’s committees and has been involved in key decision-making, including the IBM deal and the selection of the current CEO. She is also head of the firm’s CSR committee, where she oversees the company’s involvement with about 120 NGOs doing community, education and health initiatives. Artistic Impression Kiran Nadar. COURTESY HCL Apart from her new role at HCL, Nadar Malhotra has her own philanthropic interests. In 2018, she and husband Shikhar Malhotra, who is CEO of consulting arm HCL Healthcare, started a conservation group, The Habitats Trust, with personal funds that aims to protect India’s wildlife and natural habitats. The family’s philanthropy also extends to the arts through her mother Kiran Nadar, one of India’s leading art collectors and a national bridge champion. (“I blame my parents for bad parenting because I neither speak Tamil nor do I play bridge,” jokes Nadar Malhotra.) The family selected British-Ghanaian architect Sir David Adjaye to design the new Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi, though efforts to complete the paperwork for its development are now on hold during the pandemic. Her family is “excited” about the new museum, Nadar Malhotra says, which will be larger than its current premises to display her mother’s 6,000-piece collection. Megha Bahree I write about business and development in the Subcontinent. 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