What a Leap; What a Long Way to Go

You won’t need data now to believe that IT is India’s most exciting

industry. Still… IT touched $11 billion last year, growing at a blistering

50%. Consecutive years of healthy growth on a sound base. Sure, there are ten IT

companies in the US which are bigger than our industry. But then in India, this

is over twice our auto industry size, and growing several times faster.

Size has been playing a key role, especially in tougher times. The big

software companies have shown much higher growth for several years now. The DQ

Top 20 have grown at 54%, higher than the industry’s 50%. These twenty now

account for 55% of the industry, up from 51%.

But size isn’t everything. Or is it? We are often asked why Dataquest ranks

companies by revenues alone. What about products, customer satisfaction,

management, brand image, profitability?

Our answer is always the same: all those things lead to growth, and revenues.

Each year, the survey validates our stand. TCS is on top because of great

performance, not resulting from a fluke that pushed revenues up, but from

consistent management, strategy, technology, marketing, sales. The Wipro brand

has long stood for integrity and values, and they’ve shown in the top

positions this tech group has held for all these years. Infosys is another

company known for impeccable values, corporate governance, employee

satisfaction, and more, and that’s helped sustain a doubling of revenues over

nearly four consecutive years, and a stunning DQ #3 position.

On the other hand, companies that have simply pumped cash into a business

without values and skills have not thrived. The Wintech and Zap genre are the

most glaring and extreme examples of companies whose raison d’etre was fraud,

but there are enough examples in the gray areas, of companies in decline.

That’s the good news: principles, values, good products and technology, and

sound marketing and management… they not only matter, they dominate the

drivers for a company’s growth. And there are plenty of these principles in

the DQ Top 20 and in the 1,000 other IT companies covered over the three stages

of this Dataquest survey.

But the data also tells us how far we have to go. Those ten IT companies in

the US add up to $340 billion. IBM alone is $88 billion, eight times India’s

IT industry, while our IT topper, TCS, is $0.7 billion. The DQ Top 5 make up

$2.4 billion. The US Top 5–IBM, HP, Compaq, Intel and Dell–add up to exactly

100 times that figure.

There’s a long journey ahead. But it promises to be an exciting one.

pkr@cmil.com