< The 2014 All-India Research Team

Total Appearances: 3

Analyst Debut: 2012After two years in second place, Viju George of J.P. Morgan advances to claim his first top finish on this list. (The No. 1 analyst in those years, Nimish Joshi, left CLSA in February to direct M&A and investor relations efforts for Bangalore-based mobile advertising network provider InMobi.) George has “a very good grip on his sector and goes beyond the financial modeling,” observes one client. For his part, the researcher reports that his stance on India’s information technology shares is “selectively bullish.” Although the group gained 20.2 percent over the 12 months through late October, it lagged the broad domestic market by 4.1 percentage points. On the one hand, growth of the now $100 billion market is slowing, he says, yet “the industry has advanced in being able to manage margins through much-increased productivity through automation and tools” and can still manage low-teens expansion on a sustainable basis. He recommends that investors prefer those companies whose topline results are improving but whose valuations are not too expensive in the context of that growth, such as Pune-based telecommunications software developer Tech Mahindra. George, 38, also continues to be upbeat on Bangalore’s Infosys, a consulting and software services provider, which holds the promise of a turnaround. Infosys has “been severely lagging industry growth for the last two years,” he observes, because of a poorly timed strategy (Infosys 3.0), poor execution and uncertainty surrounding a change in top management. He believes that those problems are being addressed, especially with the appointment in June of Vishal Sikka as Infosys’ first nonfounding chief executive. Sikka took over in August, and George considers him a leader who “understands the digital space well and can potentially bring innovation differentiation to Infosys over the medium to long term.” At the same time, although the analyst considers Tata Consultancy Services to be the best-managed company in this sector, he would be more constructive on the Mumbai-based global IT consulting services provider’s stock if its share price declined, given that the valuation is climbing. George joined J.P. Morgan in 2010 after working as an IT analyst at Edelweiss Capital in Mumbai. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and received an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.