Results season opens into a market that badly needs good news. TCS reports on 8 October 2026, the first major company to post Q2 FY27 numbers, into a quarter that brokerages broadly expect to be muted for India's IT sector and that lands just as the Nifty 50 closes out its worst September in 25 years.
Why IT opens the season, and why it is expected to be quiet
TCS reporting first is a calendar fact, not a signal, but its number sets the tone for everything that follows in the sector. Kotak Institutional Equities expects tier-1 IT revenue growth of about 0.5% sequentially for the group, with a roughly 100 basis point year-on-year margin decline and broadly stable sequential margins, attributing the softness to AI-related deflation in service pricing and a macro backdrop that has neither improved nor worsened much since the June quarter.
HCLTech stands out as the expected exception. Analysts point to the ramp-up of its Guardian Life deal and typical seasonal strength as the reasons it should outgrow its larger peers this quarter, a pattern consistent with the strongest organic growth HCLTech posted among large IT names in Q1 FY27 too, covered in our IT sector Q1 FY27 scorecard.
The Infosys guidance question
This is the number that could matter more than any single quarter's revenue print. Infosys raised its FY27 constant-currency revenue growth guidance to 2 to 4% after a strong Q1 FY27, but Kotak now expects the company may need to trim that range toward roughly 1.5 to 2.5% given how muted demand has stayed across the sector. A confirmed cut on 23 October would be read as the clearest evidence yet that the AI-deflation pressure on IT services pricing is structural rather than a one-quarter blip.
TCS carries its own guidance-relevant detail. Kotak expects TCS to report total contract value of $10 billion to $11 billion, growth of about 5% year on year, helped by its large Porsche deal, a healthier deal-booking number than the muted revenue growth alone would suggest, since large deals typically convert to revenue over several quarters rather than immediately.
What the rest of the Nifty needs to show
IT sets the tone, but the index needs more than IT to matter. HDFC Bank and Axis Bank report on 17 October, giving an early read on private bank credit growth and asset quality heading into the festive quarter, a cluster our private bank Q1 FY27 scorecard has tracked all year, with the rest of the banking and auto sectors following through late October and November.
The stakes for the index as a whole are real. Nifty FY27 earnings growth estimates range widely by brokerage: Bloomberg consensus points to about 16.2%, JM Financial has gone as high as 17.1%, while a more cautious BofA Securities estimate sits around 8.5 to 10%, citing margin headwinds from commodity prices, a weaker monsoon and rate and AI-related risks. Street consensus broadly sits in the low-to-mid teens, roughly 13%, which makes this quarter an early test of which camp is closer to right.
Risks to monitor
The upside case is straightforward. A TCS or Infosys beat, or an HCLTech number that confirms the sector's soft patch is easing rather than deepening, would be read as evidence the worst of September's pressure has passed. This is general information, not investment advice.
The last earnings season rescued a market nobody expected to recover. This one opens into a market that has already fallen twice in the same year, and it starts answering the question within the first week of October.