India's IT exports could grow 7- 9% in 2018-19, says Nasscom

The National Association of Software and Services (Nasscom), the industry body of the Indian IT and business process management (BPM) sector, on Tuesday said the country’s IT exports could grow between 7 and 9 per cent in 2018-19.

"We estimate a 7-9 per cent growth rate in IT and IT-enabled services for 2018-19. Domestic revenues may grow slightly higher at 10-12 per cent, while exports, the mainstay, may lag in 2018-19," R Chandrashekhar, Nasscom president, told reporters here at its annual India Leadership Forum.

Terming the industry body’s views cautiously optimistic, Chandrashekhar said he hoped the export performance of the industry would be better.

He said the industry might close the current financial year with a lower-than-projected 7.8 per cent growth rate, and might touch $167 billion in revenues. 

Nasscom was able to identify some encouraging trends such as acceleration in revenues from digitisation, which is growing at the rate of 30 per cent. 

Domestic revenues are growing in double digits and this expected to continue in the next financial year, according to the industry body. Engineering, R&D, and the BPM business are growing at 13 per cent and 8 per cent, respectively.

According to Chandrashekhar, the industry may hire 100,000 people in 2018-19, which is 50 per cent lower than what it had projected for this year. However, Nasscom Chairman Raman Roy sought to allay fears about jobs shrinking. He said a large number of jobs for IT professionals were being created outside the IT sector in India as firms in other sectors were adopting digitisation in a big way.

The Telangana government signed an MoU with the Nasscom to establish a Center of Excellence for data science and artificial intelligence (CoE-DS and AI) in the state, on Tuesday.

To be set up in public-private partnership model, the facility would be an addition to the IT industry body’s hub-and-spoke network of CoEs across major locations in the country. With an initial investment of Rs 40 million, the CoE will catalyse the growth of the deep tech ecosystem in Telangana, by providing the stimulus for innovation and in-depth research in the areas of data science and artificial intelligence,” Nasscom said.