Dataquest announces India's top 20 IT firms

DQW News Bureau Bangalore, July 12

What the Top 20 Indian infotech and services firms generated $28
billion in sales, thus recording a 42 percent YoY growth in the fiscal ended
March 31, 2007, may not come as a surprise. What may be surprising is that
nearly half of these 20 firms are foreign multinationals.

The global multinationals competing with their Indian
counterparts from Indian soil include HP, IBM, Ingram Micro, Oracle, Cognizant,
Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Lenovo. Together, these nine firms employed 1,44,380
people and notched up revenues of $11 billion (Rs 49,721 crore). The foreign
multinationals recorded a growth of 39 percent over the revenues logged in
2005-06.

This was revealed by Dataquest in its 20th 'DQ Top 20'
annual survey of the Indian IT industry. The survey tracks IT industry
performance for each fiscal year (the Indian fiscal year is April to March).

The report revealed that a large number of new companies have
entered the services space. As many as 87 (that is 43 percent) of the companies
listed in Top 200 are services firms, with a predominant majority of them
drawing their revenues from exports

The top three players-Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro
and Infosys-together with Satyam, HCL Technologies, Teledata Informatics,
Redington India, HCL Infosystems, Tech Mahindra, Patni Computer Systems and
Moser Baer, contributed the remaining $17 billion. The total number of software
and BPO employees engaged by these 11 firms added up to 3,42,000.

Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia, recollected that when he started
his specialty-publishing house 25 years ago, the Indian IT industry was under a
$100 million. Gupta added, "India's IT industry is now at a mature and
respectable size, with healthy growth on a substantial base. And so are the
Dataquest top 20 companies. It was just four years ago that TCS crossed a
billion dollars. Now, no less than 12 of the 20 are over $1 billion in
sales."

"These 20 are global multinationals, whatever their origin.
They together contributed nearly 64 percent of the total sales of the top 200
firms in India," said Prasanto K Roy, Chief Editor, Dataquest.

"From competing as offshore or onsite IT services companies
with back offices in India, the Indian services majors are getting truly global,
with multiple locations and a mix of manpower, competing with the global
majors," Roy added.

The other big multinationals represented among the top 20
software exporters from India include Capgemini (Rs 1,114 crore), Aricent (Rs
1,072 crore), Perot Systems (Rs 972 crore) and Syntel (Rs 932 crore).

For the first time, leading US firms like EDS (Rs 490 crore),
Google (Rs 96 crore) and Affiliated Computer Services (Rs 88 crore) too have
featured in the Top 200 list. ($1 = Rs 45.05 average for 2006-07; 1 crore = 100
lakh = 10 mn)

According to Dataquest, Indian IT services firms constitute a
large chunk of the Top 20 companies that went truly global, be it in terms of
building delivery capability in other offshore destinations or targeting newer
markets beyond the US.

Most firms reported higher revenues from Europe and are making
efforts to deepen their engagements. The Europe entry strategy adopted by many
IT services firms to accelerate their business growth was rewarded amply with
the US dollar weakening sharply, while the Euro and the UK Pound held steady or
gained.