The Hyderabad-headquartered company's consolidated net profit dropped 2% to 1.53 billion rupees ($18.42 million) for the quarter ended Dec. 31. Analysts, on average, had expected a profit of 1.85 billion rupees, as per LSEG data.

The company's employee costs jumped 9% year-on-year to 8.97 billion during the quarter.

Cyient also narrowed full-year outlook for revenue growth in its digital, engineering and technology (DET) unit to 13%-13.5% from 15%-20%. The company did not mention the reasons behind the narrowed forecast.

Earlier this month, larger peers Infosys Ltd, HCL Technologies and Wipro also tightened forecast and flagged that macro conditions had hardly changed from the previous quarter.

However, their numbers and commentary turned out to better-than-feared, fuelling a rally in IT stocks and pushing the country's benchmark indexes to fresh all-time highs this month.

Consolidated revenue from operations for Cyient rose 12.5% to 18.21 billion rupees for the quarter on the back of growth in the sustainability and transportation verticals. This is slightly ahead of analysts' average estimate of 17.11 billion rupees, according to LSEG data.

Cyient shares closed 1.2% lower at 2,019.65 rupees on Thursday ahead of the results.

($1 = 83.0830 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Sai Ishwarbharath B; Editing by Janane Venkatraman)