Cognizant soars in US market

BANGALORE: Over the last year, IT major Cognizant’s stocks have outperformed the American depositary receipts (ADR) of top tier Indian peers Infosys and Wipro on the US markets by a big margin.

Between March 5, 2010, and March 4, 2011, Cognizant stocks on Nasdaq rose 55% to $76.32. Wipro’s on the NYSE remained flat at around $13.45 and Infosys’s on Nasdaq increased 17.5% to $67.67 during this period. Over the last three months, Cognizant stocks rose 9.5%, while Wipro and Infosys stocks fell 7% and 2.6% respectively .

“Growth is heavily rewarded in the US markets. That has helped Cognizant's stronger upward rally ,” said Ankur Rudra, IT sector analyst at Ambit Capital.

In the previous quarter, Cognizant’s revenues grew 45% year-on-year to $1.31 billion. Correspondingly, Infosys grew 28.7% to $1.56 billion and Wipro grew 19% to $1.34 billion.