Overview : Growth Interrupted

There were three major headlines in 2007-08. The continuing shadow-boxing
between the Congress and the Left (to be nuclear or not to be), the IPL-ICL
fracas, and the fluctuating dollar-rupee relationship and its impact on
export-oriented businesses, particularly the IT exporters.

The Indian IT services vendors, people who actually defined the offshore
exports paradigm, seemed to be the worse affected; the dollar depreciation and
ironically its subsequent appreciation (in cases where many hedged aggressively)
affected most of them including the Big Five.

Some statistics in the DQTop200 illustrate their predicament. With half of
the Top 20 constituted by export-oriented companies, the growth rate of this
exclusive club came down to 24% in FY 08 (from 41% in 07). The fortunes of the
Top 20 exporters in DQ 200 make the picture more precise. While these companies
had grown by 45% in 07, the corresponding growth figure dwindled down to only
29% in 08.With ninety-five of the DQ 200 being services companies (most of them
involved in exports), the impact of the dollar-rupee fluctuation has been the
over-riding theme in the DQ Top 20 this year. Interestingly, what this also did
was ensure that most of these companies had to seriously foray into the domestic
Indian marketit was no more a question of adding one more geography, but more
of business laissez-faire. Many associated the relatively insipid year for even
a giant like Infosys to their failure to start domestic ventures.

The hit taken by exports vendors have been somewhat offset by the performance
of the vendors primarily operating in the domestic market. This trend has been
increasingly visible for the last few years, and this year it somewhat acted as
a balm for the DQ 200. Unfortunately, here too, the growth has not been secular
at all. That explains why despite companies like SAP and Acer registering triple
digit growths, the Top 20 domestic players grew by only 27% (down from 31% in
07).

Ibrahim Ahmad & Team DQ

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

See Ranking List

Interestingly, three Indian companies make place for three MNCs in this years Top 20 club. Another case of globalization

A look at the Top 200 Indian IT companies reveals that 95 of them are IT services companies and 20 offer packaged software. Both together add up to 57.5%, up from the 53% last year. There were 26 companies in the distribution business, and 45 were into hardware and networking products. The interesting thing is that out of the Top 200 of India, only 5 companies including Wipro, HP, IBM, and Sun, had positioned themselves as players which dealt in multiple activities including hardware, software and services

Fourteen companies registered triple digit growth, five of them growing more than 200%. This growth was secular too as it spread across types of companiesfinancial services, entertainment and hardware.

Though the domestic story was better than the exports, it wasnt much to write home about. Compared to a 31% growth in FY 07, last fiscal saw it come down to 27%

Oil companies were not the only ones to be impacted by the dollar depreciation. Compared to the 45% growth in FY 07, the top exporters in the DQ 200 could garner only 30% growth last fiscal. The credit for that goes largely to Financial Technologies which grew a stupendous 673%

NEW FACES

Suresh Vaswani, joint CEO, Wipro	Girish Paranjpe, joint CEO, Wipro	Neelam Dhawan, MD, HP India	Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Tech	Harsh Manglik, chairman & MD, Accenture	Ranjan Das president & CEO SAP India

 

Praveen Vishakantaiah, president, Intel India	Sameer Garde, country GM,Dell India	Amar Babu, MD, Lenovo India	Jeya Kumar, CEO MphasiS	Ratul Puri, CEO, Moser Baer	Pramod Bhasin, president & CEO, Genpact

 

Jignesh Shah, MD, Financial Technologies India	Akash Deep Sharma, head of Operations/COO, eSys Information Technologies	Anurag Jain, regional managing director, Perot Systems	Sanjay Dhawan, President, Aricent	Hitesh Lokhandawala, CEO, Nortel Networks India	Sanjeev Sinha, MD, Siemens Information Systems

 

PR Chandr-ashekhar, VP & CEO, Hexaware Technologies	George Van Der Merwe, COO, SES Technologies	Jangoo Dalal, Managing Director & CEO, D-Link India	L Madhu, APSIS technologies, CEO