Mumbai, Aug. 17: The rupee has started to stagger — and the bean counters at India’s leading information technology companies are beginning to beam.

Walloped for over a year by the steady surge in the rupee’s value against the dollar, the IT giants — who earn more than 90 per cent of their revenues in foreign exchange — have winced every quarter to see their profits gouged by the exchange rate.

The software giants have always taken out large dollar hedges to minimise the impact that a rampant rupee can have on their profits.

For every 1 per cent appreciation in the rupee, there is approximately 40 basis points drop in the margins of IT companies.

Although the outlook for the rupee is mixed, most analysts feel that the rupee will be under pressure because of the restrictions that the government recently clamped on external commercial borrowings.

The flip side is that if the market stabilises in the meantime, it will encourage more inflows into the country, thus strengthening the rupee.

During the last quarter ended June 30, infotech companies had to contend with a rupee that has surged some 7 per cent. Companies such as Infosys Technologies had lost Rs 287 crore in their first quarter owing to this.

“We are basically exporters, so a weaker rupee will mean gains for us. As of June 30, all our contracts maturing beyond August 2007 will give us a combined gain of Rs 35 crore. But we are not disclosing the rate at which we have hedged the rupee,” said Jatin Dalal, senior manager (corporate treasury and investor relationship).

Exporters have taken an advantage of the rupee’s fall to a four-month low against the dollar to cash in on some of the gains.

The rupee today closed the day at 41.33 against the dollar, after dropping as low as 41.71, the lowest since April 24 this year.

The Indian currency had dived 61.50 paise to 41.37 against the dollar on Thursday against Tuesday’s close of 40.75.