Beat the peers, drop the stock: The brutal reality facing Cognizant’s CEO

The company’s shares fell to a six-year low on May 13, closing at $45.97 apiece on Nasdaq. Cognizant’s market value of $21.78 billion was also at its lowest level that day. It wasn’t a sudden drop. The company’s shares have fallen more than 38% since this year; this is more than that of TCS, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Wipro, which fell between 30% and 33% each. As part of a quarterly rebalancing, Cognizant was even removed from the Nasdaq-100 index of the 100 largest non-financial companies.