IT stock dip an over-reaction, says ITC’ Sanjiv Puri

ITC’s Chairperson and MD Sanjiv Puri dubbed the rout in the Nifty IT index “an overreaction” while speaking on the sidelines of NASSCOM’s annual tech summit 2026.

“I don’t know why there is an overreaction. But let the market do its work. But the reality is that whenever technology has come forward, when applied to the requirements of the market, it has not been doomsday,” Mr. Puri said on Wednesday (February 25, 2026) in Mumbai.

The computer to cigarette conglomerate’s tech business, ITC Infotech, was 5% of the ITC group revenue as of H1FY2025, going by data on stock screen platform Screenr.

While speaking on the possibilities of the use cases of AI, he said they are being implemented in three buckets which include improving efficiency at factories, supply chian management and in marketing. 

Mr. Puri’s comments become important in the context of the rout in tech stocks a day earlier which is part of the month long underperformance of the Nifty IT index. The immediate trigger to Tuesday’s 4% decline in IT stocks came on top of Anthropic’s announcement that it had tools that automised COBOL, a computer programming language for business processes. A Newyork-based analyst Citriniresearch wrote a blog post modelling a world weather AI had become mainstream in business and was spelling that the economy would be in a different equilibrium by 2028. The post spooked investors sparking the sell-off.