After spending a little over 16 months overhauling Cyient DET’s strategy, chief executive officer and executive director Sukamal Banerjee believes FY27 will mark the start of the execution phase for the engineering research and development (ER&D) firm.
The company has increased spending on sales and marketing, cut general and administrative costs, revamped sales teams in some businesses and created a chief technology officer (CTO) organisation as part of the changes undertaken since Banerjee took charge.
The changes come as Cyient seeks to return to a stronger growth trajectory. The Cyient group reported revenue of $821 million in FY26, with services (DET) accounting for around $657 million. Including acquisitions already announced, Banerjee expects the group to reach a billion-dollar revenue run rate “very quickly” over the next couple of quarters.
A key part of the strategy is Cyient’s shift from being primarily identified as an engineering research and development (ER&D) services company to what Banerjee calls a ‘lifecycle engineering services’ firm. The company is looking beyond the engineering and design stage of a product to areas such as manufacturing, quality and servicing, where engagements can stretch across several years or even decades.
“The end result we are seeking in each of our industries is a longer-term, visible, sticky business,” said Banerjee. “And the way to do it is, what is longer-term sticky for the customer, and align to that.”
Banerjee shares that engineering work increasingly extends well beyond designing a product, particularly in sectors such as aerospace, automotive, energy and medtech. “While building a product can take two to three years, or five to seven years in aerospace, those products can remain in operation for anywhere between eight and 100 years, creating opportunities across their lifecycle,” he explains.
The shift is also aimed at reducing volatility in Cyient’s business. In connectivity, for instance, a large portion of work is linked to customers’ capital expenditure. While the company may have visibility on how much customers will eventually spend, the timing of that expenditure can be difficult to predict, affecting quarterly revenue visibility and capacity management.
To address this, Cyient has been working on changing the portfolio of work it takes on. For instance, in the connectivity vertical, the company has completely revamped its sales team, redirecting it towards areas where it sees greater growth potential. “We are already seeing early signs of the change through its deal funnel, including some advanced large-deal discussions,” he added.
Technology is the other leg of the transformation. “We have created a CTO organisation, which did not exist earlier, and intend to run it as an R&D organisation rather than measuring it on quarterly revenue. The team is already working on areas such as physical AI and quantum computing.”
The company is also using AI internally across functions, including sales and finance. “It’s not that AI is only in one pocket or only in the technology bucket. It’s probably one of the most pervasive general-purpose technologies in a long, long time. So everybody has to deal with it,” said Banerjee.
Cyient has also built agentic artificial intelligence (AI) platforms around its lifecycle engineering strategy and is in active discussions with customers. However, the company currently sees data as a bigger business opportunity than AI itself, particularly given its experience working with operational data from areas such as mining, plant operations and maintenance, repair and overhaul shop floors.
The company is also looking to move up the deal-size curve. While it may not yet be in a position to routinely win billion-dollar engagements, Banerjee said Cyient can compete for deals ranging from $30-40 million to $50 million-plus and around $100 million. “We are not trying to get into the red ocean which exists in IT outsourcing. Some of our peers have publicly announced that as mid-sized companies, they would like to disrupt the apple cart of the larger system integration companies. That is not our playbook,” he added.
Instead, Cyient wants to concentrate on product lifecycle opportunities where it expects demand for larger engagements to emerge as product volumes increase across aerospace, energy and automotive.
On growth, Banerjee clarified that the company has not given revenue guidance for FY27 and is initially looking to return to quarter-on-quarter growth. Its aspiration for FY28 and FY29 is for double-digit year-on-year growth in order intake.
On revenue growth, he said that without large deals, investors should think about growth in the mid-single digits. Large deal wins could, however, take growth closer to double digits.
“As of now, without large deals, let’s think about mid-single-digit growth. With large deals, can it get closer to double-digit growth? The answer is yes,” he said.
Banerjee also believes that the group’s foray and diversification into semiconductors (Cyient Semiconductors) and design-led manufacturing (Cyient DLM) will have synergy with Cyient’s DET (digital, engineering and technology).
