As Infoscions and its stakeholders assembled for its 29th Annual General Meeting held on Saturday, N R Narayana Murthy, chairman and chief mentor, Infosys Technologies, put on record the absence of co-founder Nandan Nilekani in this annual exercise - a first in all these years.

After guiding to a revenue drop for 2009-10, Infosys actually managed to report a 3 per cent year-on-year growth which helped the $4.8 billion company report 2.5 per cent rise in net income on a year-on- year basis. "The year 2009 was tough for everyone," said the man who in 1981 co-founded Infosys, which now operates in over 30 countries.

"Global output contracted by nearly 1 per cent. Global trade contracted by 25 per cent. Global unemployment rose by a whopping 9 per cent...however, towards the end of the fiscal, most of the developed economies started reporting positive growth. The developing economies that showed a modest 2.5 per cent growth in 2009, started to accelerate," said Murthy.

Murthy, who also serves on boards of HSBC Holdings Plc. and Unilever Plc., looked ahead with guarded optimism. "The global output is expected to grow by more than 4 per cent. However, we cannot ignore the threats from the highly leveraged economies. The early signs of coming out of recession cannot be taken for granted," said the founder-chairman of Bangalore-headquartered Infosys.

"For example, while the US household wealth increased by $5.65 trillion in the last nine months of 2009 - it reversed only about a third of the $17.5 trillion slump over the seven previous quarters,” said Murthy of Infosys, whose 65.8 per cent revenues in 2009-10 came from North America. He added that nine months since the upturn, the global GDP (gross domestic product) seems to be growing at around 4 per cent - though unemployment across the world is projected to continue at a high of 9 per cent,"

Recovery of this kind of crisis - triggered by a liquidity crisis in the United States banking system and caused by the overvaluation of assets - may be slow and weak, warned Murthy, who is known to prefer huge cash reserves for the company. For the year ended March 31, 2010, Infosys reported cash and cash equivalents of $3.5 billion - almost of 73 per cent of last year's revenues for the company, which employs over 1.13 lakh people globally.