The Hindu : Business : Software’s hard battles make IT a $50 b industry

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jul 03, 2007
ePaper

Business

Business

Software’s hard battles make IT a $50 b industry

Anand Parthasarathy

The sector increases share of global pie

IT’s now the largest private employer: Nasscom
‘Dataquest Top 20’ points to new growth in Europe

— PHOTO: G. R. N. SOMASHEKAR

ON TARGET: Kiran Karnik (left), President, and Lakshmi Narayanan, Chairman, Nasscom, addressing a press conference in Bangalore on Monday.

BANGALORE: “We have the required run -rate, so we can ease off a bit. But with seven wickets down, IT’s not going to be too easy,” Kiran Karnik, President, National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) President Kiran Karnik said on Monday, using cricketing analogies for his ‘match report’ on the Indian information technology industry.

A scorching over-all growth rate of 30.7 per cent, which saw revenues of $39.6 billion in 2006-07, had the IT and IT-enabled services sector poised to become a $50 billion business in 2008 — four-fifths of this to come from exports, Mr. Karnik said.

“We are on target to cross $60 billion by 2010,” Mr. Karnik said, adding, “But there is plenty of head room left; we have space to grow eight to ten fold.”

Within the overall IT software export spectrum, services grew by 35.5 per cent in the last fiscal, clocking revenues of $18 billion.

The business processes and enabled services sector was only marginally slower at 33.5 per cent and contributed $8.4 billion.

The nascent engineering services business set a more sedate pace at 23 per cent to contribute revenues of $4.9 billion.

“The Indian industry has been constantly innovating, adding new service lines and increasing its competitiveness,” Nasscom Chairman Lakshmi Narayanan said. “We are now the world’s largest IT service provider,” he added.

The industry was also the nation’s largest private sector employer — with 1.6 million direct jobs and another six million indirectly created by ancillaries, Mr. Karnik added.

Nasscom also released its ranking of the top 20 software and services players in 2006-07 — limiting the list to companies headquartered in India. The top five are: TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, HCL and Tech Mahindra.

Dataquest rankings

In a simultaneous announcement, Dataquest magazine, released its annual rankings for the Indian IT industry and credited the top ten players with contributing $15 billion in exports, of which the top three — TCS, Infosys and W ipro — were credited with $8.70 billion. DQ ratings make no distinction between domestic players and international companies operating in India — which is why its top 10 is almost identical with Nasscom’s except that global players like IBM (5), Cognizant (7) and Oracle (8) are reflected.

The spectacular growth of Tech Mahindra has been noted by DQ — storming into the top 20 with a 135 per cent growth and revenues of Rs. 2,890 crore. Dataquest’s Chief Editor Prasanto K. Roy sees the next wave of opportunity coming from Europe, almost all companies seeing their share of revenues from Europe growing sharply.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Business

News Update

Stories in this Section