Karnataka's software exports grew 52%

STPI numbers indicate state held on to national lead

Karnataka has held on to its lead as the prime IT services exporting state in the country.

According to the Software Technology Park of India's (STPI) Bangalore unit, for the year to March 2005, Karnataka exported Rs 27,600 crore ($6.27 billion) of IT services, a growth of 52 per cent over last fiscal.

This has enabled Karnataka to maintain its share of the country's software and services exports at 36 per cent.

S Ramadorai, the new chairman of the industry lobby NASSCOM, has indicated that exports in 2004-05 are provisionally pegged at $17.5 billion. IT exports from the state had grown 48 per cent the previous fiscal and jumped 7 percentage points to 36 per cent.

For the year to March 2005, while Bangalore continued to account for the bulk of the IT exports from the state, exports from Mysore jumped 72 per cent to Rs 309 crore and Mangalore improved by 25 per cent to touch Rs 567 crore, B V Naidu, the director of STPI Bangalore told reporters here.

The state's secretary for IT, M K Shankaralinge Gowda was quick to hold this as proof that "contrary to what people said, Bangalore continues to be the top IT destination in the country."

During FY05, the STPI approved 206 companies wanting to start operations in the state, Naidu said, translating to four firms every week, "a never before number". Of them, 129 were foreign equity firms that brought in over 60 per cent of the Rs 2,783 crore of the "total projected IT investment" from the approved firms, he said.

Among the approved units were eight hardware firms, including a global electronics contract manufacturing firm, Elcoteq. Hardware exports from the state during the year grew marginally from last fiscal's Rs 1,700 crore to Rs 1,768 crore this year.

The number of hardware firms in the state grew from 36 in the previous fiscal to 44 in FY05. The remaining 198 approvals were for software and business process outsourcing firms. This grew 18 per cent over last fiscal, he said.

Of the total exports, some 40 per cent was accounted for by the 'captive units' of multinational firms and another 50 per cent was accounted for by the top 10 Indian IT firms.

During the year, some 50,000 jobs were created in the sector in the state, taking the number of people employed in IT, IT-enabled services and business process outsourcing to nearly three lakh, Naidu said.

"We expect the current fiscal to add another 50,000 jobs in the state, and our exports to cross $8 billion," Gowda said.