Business is better than mood

Industry leaders positive about economic growth, confident of better investments in IT sector

The estimated growth of 11-14 per cent for the Indian information technology (IT) industry for 2012-13 might have come as a shocker to many, but the mood at the 20th edition of Nasscom’s Leadership Forum 2012 seemed sombre.

The activity at the IT industry’s flagship event seemed to have moved to coffee shops, where many of the top leaders of the IT industry chose to meet customers.

“This is not of Nasscom alone. I have attended a couple of industry events in the last few months and people have used such forums to connect with customers and get a better picture,” said a chief executive officer (CEO) of a leading financial services firm on condition of anonymity.

Industry leaders such as S Gopalakrishnan, executive chairman, Infosys and T K Kurien, CEO, Wipro, while they attended the forum, preferred to spend time with customers.

IT industry leaders, however, maintained though uncertainties were looming, the negative mood was more the handy work of the media and social media. 

“If I may say, ‘screw the mood’. Even if other people want to look at the market at the East or the West, my company is happy to be in the middle, that is India,” said Rajiv Bajaj, MD, Bajaj Auto. Gopalakrishnan of Infosys and Shikha Sharma of Axis Bank said even the policy paralysis within the domestic market is being talked too much. “Investment within the technology sector will continue to grow. From an India point of view even the seven per cent growth is a good number. There are very few countries which can talk of this growth,” said Gopalakrishnan.

Agreed N Chandrasekaran, MD & CEO of TCS. “We are at a unique point in time where different economies need different remedies for their problems. Europe needs to restructure itself, the US needs to reinvent itself and India needs to re-energise. There is, too, much negativity and the general nervousness due to the economic crisis is only adding to it. But we need to move on,” he said.

For the industry, some of the silver lining include the e-governance measures that are being put in place, the fast growing healthcare market in the US and even Europe, where customers are looking for a higher share of off shoring.

The US healthcare outsourcing market is a $100-billion worth opportunity waiting to be explored, according to Ritesh Idnani, SVP and COO of Infosys BPO. “We expect the healthcare segment to see a growth of 15-20 per cent over the next few quarters,” he said.

The US healthcare market has two components — payer and provider. For the BPO segment alone, the payer market is expected to grow 10 per cent to $13.5 billion by 2015 as insurance companies look for partners to move back-office claims management work. The BPO opportunity in the provider segment (hospitals) has a compound annual growth rate of 14 per cent between 2011 and 2015 when the available opportunity would be $9 billion.