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Epitomising new entrepreneurship

The season of corporates presenting their quarterly report cards is once again upon us and quite predictably Infosys among the larger ones is first off the block. The company has come out with yet another quarter of exceptional growth in sales and net profits. The market may have been somewhat disappointed that its earnings have not grown quite as much as it expected and consequently marked the company's share price down on the day. However, the vast majority of retail investors, especially those who stayed through with Infosys from the time it went public, have no cause for complaint as the performance in the latest quarter is in line with the past. Indeed, ever since the company began operations (in 1982), its sales have grown at a compounded annual rate of nearly 60 per cent. That is remarkable by any standards and it seems highly unlikely that there is a comparable record of achievement in the history of corporate India. Whether the future throws up more such winners or not, the company can justly lay claim to being synonymous with a spirit of enterprise and an ability to triumph against heavy odds, which we have always believed India possessed but which has rarely been in evidence.

As the company completes 25 years of world-class success, it is time to reflect on what this symbolises for Indian enterprise. Infosys has shown that it is possible for a group of highly talented professionals to come together, share a common vision, and collectively contribute to the success of an enterprise without the ego clashes that are all too common in such situations. Its success has also spawned a culture of entrepreneurship among the educated middle class, which in the past did not look beyond a career in the civil services or a multinational organisation or migration to the West as the ultimate in realising one's potential. Most important of all, it has shown that business success can be achieved without having to manipulate the regulatory and administrative structure to one's own advantage. Infosys, along with a few other software majors, rewrote the rules of the outsourcing game, primarily moving those modules of software development that could be executed outside the borders of a customer's home country. That strategy has now been copied by the more established players from the West who are increasingly shifting their operations to India as they seek to whittle away the advantage of the low labour cost of the local software industry. For Infosys and the other software majors, fashioning a winning strategy in the years ahead should be more of a challenge than what they encountered in their initial years of existence.

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