Jan 13 (Reuters) - Indian engineering research and development (ER&D) firm Tata Elxsi reported a 45.3% drop in third-quarter profit on Tuesday, primarily due to a one-time charge tied to the country's new labour codes.
The Bengaluru-based company reported a profit of 1.09 billion rupees ($12.1 million) for the quarter ended December 31.
Tata Elxsi took an exceptional charge of 956.9 million rupees for the reported quarter, citing a one-time increase in employee benefit provisions following India's new labour codes.
The codes, which came into effect in November, require employee wages to be at least 50% of cost to company, and benefits like provident fund and gratuity to be determined based on wages.
On Monday, IT companies TCS and HCLTech also reported one-time charges of 21.3 billion rupees and 9.6 billion rupees, respectively, to factor in the new labour codes.
However, Tata Elxsi's third-quarter revenue grew 1.5% year over year to 9.53 billion rupees driven by growth in its software development and services segment.
Excluding the exceptional item and taxes, the firm reported a profit of 2.42 billion rupees for the third-quarter, a 5.4% decline from the same quarter last year.
Shares of the company closed 1.6% higher ahead of results.
($1 = 90.2010 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Mridula Kumar, Nandan Mandayam and Aleef Jahan in Bengaluru; Editing by Harikrishnan Nair)
