'Our goal is to have 25% revenue from Asian markets'

Q&A: Hitesh Lokhandwala

on the company's plans for India. Excerpts:

Having taken over as the MD of Nortel India, what would be your priorities?

Lokhandwala:

We will focus on maintaining the growth momentum and accelerating the carrier and enterprise segment. The recently concluded $100 million BSNL contract is one of our largest deals.

We started the year 2008 by striking some good deals in the airport and port segment and have won almost all the deals in this vertical till date. Apart from this, we are in discussion with all the major operators on their WiMax strategies.

With your competitors moving into the home segment, what are your plans?

Lokhandwala:

We are continuously evaluating our strategy. We want to expand our small medium enterprises (SME) base by focusing on network expansion, besides launching newer products and services. We announced the SME focus in mid 2007 and have done quite well with almost 100 per cent growth.

Nortel is increasing its R&D spend in China. What about India?

Lokhandwala:

India and China have been strong R&D bases for Nortel across a number of years. We started our R&D work in India very early (early 90s) by building key relationships with players such as TCS, Infosys and Sasken. In conjunction, we have Nortel Technology Excellence Centre (NTEC) in Bangalore.

How do you view India, given the company's increasing focus on emerging markets?

Seeto:

Asia is certainly a major growth area for the company. We are aiming at 20-25 per cent revenue from the Asian markets and have made good progress thus far. Currently 15 per cent of the company's revenue comes from Asia.

We are uniquely positioned in the Indian and Chinese markets primarily due to some of our earlier bets. We had supported the growth story of our customers in their 2G growth phase, besides focussing on the carrier Ethernet technology and creating viable solutions in the unified communications segment.

What do you have to say about Nortel's plans to move 1,000 positions to higher growth and lower cost geographies?

Seeto:

We continuously evaluate the best business models. Asia will account for 20-25 per cent of the company's revenue base. This would not be achievable unless we move some of our capabilities to the growth areas.