The Number Game

To manyincluding some of my colleagues it seems very intriguing why a few

of us get so excited about numbers, especially when we are doing Top20.

Honestly, I myself do not have a very convincing answer to that. One of the

early lessons that I got as a business journalist is that to be a business

journalist, you can never underestimate the value of numbers (that is a

no-brainer), but to be a good one at that, you must not overestimate the value

of numbers.

DQ Top 20 is not just about numbers. They give you an overall picture of the

industry, analyze the performance of market segments and companies within Indian

IT and highlight all the major changes that happened during the previous

financial year. But at the core of that are a set of numbers. And like all of us

in the Dataquest team, many of our readers get excited by those numbers. The

number of times that IT companies refer to the Dataquest Top20 numbers far

outweigh the number of times they quote a sentence out of our write-ups. And

that is a reality that has not changed over the years.

Well, enough of justification. As we talk of numbers, I want to highlight

three things about Top20this years Top20 in particular. Two of them are

directly about numbers.

First and foremost is the paradox of currency-adjusted growth. As we get more

and more globalized, most of our numbers are being represented in at least two

sets of currencies: rupee and dollar. In some cases, in euro and pound sterling

too. And unlike Centigrade and Farenheit, unlike miles and kilometers, the

ratios between them keep changing. And that adds to the confusion. For example,

all of us know that last year was a bad year for everyone, including the

exporters. If you see their growth (well, bad for Indian companies still means

growth) in dollars, you realize that. If you convert that to rupee (which is our

base currency for all calculations), you see they have grown faster than the

previous year. In last years Top20, when the rupee had actually strengthened

during that period, it was just the reverse. Most of them had a better dollar to

dollar growth rate, as compared to a rupee to rupee growth. That is a big

confusion.

The second point I want to highlight is how companies act when it comes to

sharing data with us. This year, which was a bad year for many, we thought it

would be difficult but what we discovered is that by and large those companies

that have shared data with us traditionally did share, irrespective of their

performance, while those who have traditionally not done so did not. The

slowdown had little to do with the transparency of a company. While most Indian

companies, led by the top three, have always shared the details with us, I see

that increasingly many non-Indian companies are beginning to share those

details. Some of the companies that I would like to highlight are Samsung, Acer,

CSC and Steria. Besides, quite a few non-Indian companies do cooperate with us

which makes us estimate their India revenues precisely and more importantly,

give a view of their business, beyond numbers. Most large companies including

IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, SAP and EMC fall in this category. It is only

a handful of companies that do not cooperate at all, citing company policies.

Going by the trend though, I am optimistic that the number of companies that do

share information will only go up.

The third thing I would like to highlight about this years Top20 Volume I is

that we really missed Satyam. Notwithstanding what its promoters and a few top

managers did, Satyam was a good company to analyze and follow as it did many

things right, like say getting into the SAP space, engineering design, and media

& entertainment vertical earlier than others. And their managers down the line

were absolutely accessible and cooperative. I just hope that it makes a big

comeback to Top20 next year with its new identity.

Shyamanuja Das



The author is Editor of Dataquest.
shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in