The IT-BPO sector has become one of the most significant growth catalysts for the Indian economy. In addition to fuelling India’s economy, this industry is also positively influencing the lives of its people through an active direct and indirect contribution to the various socio-economic parameters such as employment, standard of living and diversity among others. The industry has played a significant role in transforming India’s image from a slow moving bureaucratic economy to a land of innovative entrepreneurs and a global player in providing world class technology solutions and business services.
The industry has helped India transform from a rural and agriculture-based economy to a knowledge based economy. The efforts of the industry towards the holistic development of the Indian economy and society will continue making a positive impact and changing lives as it has done so far. Further, the industry has acted as socially responsible corporations playing an active role in regional development across India, empowerment of diverse human assets, driving technology and innovation to transform client businesses, and enhancing the overall brand image of India.
On its part, since 2009, as a result of an altered demand landscape, the sector had begun to transform itself by actively diversifying beyond core offerings and markets through new business and pricing models, specialise to provide end-to-end service offerings with deeper penetration across verticals, transform process delivery through re-engineering and enabling technology, innovate through research and development and drive inclusive growth in India by developing targeted solutions for the domestic Indian market. When demand returned in 2010, the combined effect of all these factors helped India grow faster than its competitors, accounting for almost 90 per cent of incremental growth in the global sourcing market.
Global sourcing trends
Worldwide technology products and services related spend is estimated to reach USD 1.6 trillion in 2010, a growth of 4 per cent over 2010, with emerging verticals and emerging geographies, in addition to US, driving growth. Worldwide hardware spends increased by 6.4 per cent on the back of a global refresh cycle. IT services spend increasing by 1.4 per cent in 2010, within which IT outsourcing grew by 2.4 per cent. Continuous ROI focus led to BPO growing by 4 per cent, while software products rose by 3.7 per cent led by increased focus on security, storage, and application development. Within IT outsourcing, global sourcing grew by 10.4 per cent in 2010, validating the industry’s integral position in service delivery chain.
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The year saw wide ranging contract restructuring exercises, and deal size reductions as buyers came to terms with new business models and budgetary constraints. However, multi-sourcing saw higher adoption, precipitated by the increased maturity of Indian providers. Recent global M&A activity in the sector indicates select acquisitions by established service providers to enhance skill and scale. While cost and talent still remain essential considerations for global sourcing, savvy customers are constantly demanding more – growth markets, flexibility and innovation. With customers demanding more immediate value from IT and forward-looking strategies that support growth and innovation, service providers are adopting agile methods focusing on operational excellence through ongoing innovation, diversification, renewed partnerships/alliances and new business models.
Indian IT-BPO performance
The sector is estimated to aggregate revenues of USD 88.1 billion in FY2011, with the IT software and services sector (excluding hardware) accounting for USD 76.1 billion of revenues. During this period, direct employment is expected to reach nearly 2.5 million, an addition of 240,000 employees, while indirect job creation is estimated at 8.3 million. As a proportion of national GDP, the sector revenues have grown from 1.2 per cent in FY1998 to an estimated 6.4 per cent in FY 2011. Its share of total Indian exports (merchandise plus services) increased from less than 4 per cent in FY1998 to 26 per cent in FY2011.
Exports market:
Export revenues are estimated to gross USD 59 billion in FY2011 accounting for a 2 million workforce.
- Geographic focus: The year was characterised by a consistent demand from the US, which increased its share to 61.5 per cent. Emerging markets of Asia Pacifi c and Rest of the world also contributed significantly to overall growth.
- Vertical Markets: While the sector’s vertical market mix is well balanced across several mature and emerging sectors, FY2011 was characterised by broad based demand across traditional segments such as Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), but also new emerging verticals of retail, Healthcare, Media and Utilities.
- Service Lines: Within exports, IT Services segment was the fastest growing segment, growing by 22.7 per cent over FY2010, and aggregating export revenues of USD 33.5 billion, accounting for 57 per cent of total exports. Indian IT service offerings have evolved from application development and maintenance, to emerge as full service players providing testing services, infrastructure services, consulting and system integration. The coming of a new decade heralds a strategic shift for IT services organisations, from a ‘one factory, one customer’ model to a ‘one factory, all customers’ model. Central to this strategy is the growing customer acceptance of Cloud-based solutions which offer best in class services at reduced capital expenditure levels.
The engineering design and products development segments generated revenues of USD 9 billion in FY2011; growing by 13.6 per cent, driven by increasing use of electronics, fuel efficiency norms, convergence of local markets, and localised products. Increasing confidence in relationships between customers and service providers successfully executing a variety of activities across low-medium-high complexity projects has led to increasingly larger sizes of projects being sourced from India.
Domestic market:
Domestic IT-BPO revenues excluding hardware are expected to grow at almost 16 per cent to reach ` 787 billion in FY2011. Strong economic growth, rapid advancement in technology infrastructure, increasingly competitive Indian organisations, enhanced focus by the government and emergence of business models that help provide IT to new customer segments are the key drivers for increased technology adoption in India
- IT services is one of the fastest growing segment in the Indian domestic market, rising by 16.8 per cent to reach ` 501 billion, driven by localised strategies designed by service providers.
- Domestic BPO segment is expected to grow by 16.9 per cent in FY2011, to reach ` 127 billion, driven by demand from voice based services, in addition to adoption from emerging verticals, new customer segments, and value based transformational outsourcing platforms
- Indian software product segment is estimated to grow by 14 per cent to reach ` 157 billion, fueled by replacement of in-house software applications to standardised products from large organisations and innovative start-ups
- Government sector is a key catalyst for increased IT adoption- through sectors reforms that encourage IT acceptance, National eGovernance Programmes (NeGP) , and the Unique Identification Development Authority of India (UIDAI) programme that creates large scale IT infrastructure and promotes corporate participation
India has retained its’ position as the leading global shoring destination with a 55 per cent share of global ITO and BPO market in 2010, and been able to increase its market share in spite of competitive challenges presented by emerging off shoring destinations. This has been only possible due to the development of a set of factors unique to India, that multiply India’s value proposition manifold. While the cost advantage is unparalleled, India has the world’s largest pool of employable talent, service delivery infrastructure across multiple geographically dispersed locations within the country, and a supportive policy regime. However, the Indian global sourcing industry is no longer hinging its value proposition on cost, talent, infrastructure and processes which are considered as basic tools to operate in the global sourcing landscape. With customers also pushing for more collaborative contracts where there is business metric performance measurement and greater risk-reward sharing, Indian industry is increasingly being driven by the following four factors:
- Transformational Business impact – Client business transformation happening through- - Verticalised solutioning – A number of organisations have restructured themselves around verticals and Centres of Excellences - so as to develop and deliver end to end services keeping in mind customer needs, creating products aimed at growing emerging markets and creating a substantial revenue impact for them. These verticalised business units act as a source of innovation and development of proof of concept solutions
- Technology enablement – Development of solutions around platforms, cloud based products integrating business intelligence, and application development tools are proving to be game changers for an increasing set of customers. This is also prompting customers to move from CAPEX to OPEX based models
- Process innovation/re-engineering – Coupled with automation and six sigma skills, incremental set of enhancements imbibing best in class learning and practices in established service delivery processes also have the ability to create wide ranging transformation for clients - Service Delivery maturity – India is the most mature outsourcing market, with Indian service providers having developed end to end service delivery capabilities around all verticals. Further, there is increased globalisation in service delivery, cross border collaboration and partnerships to enhance service offerings, and reengineering of the talent pool for greater productivity and efficiency
- Scalability – India’s scale and flexibility is unique- a vast labour pool, network of Tier II/III cities offering further cost reduction and increased infrastructure spend are the cornerstones to this advantage offered by India over other locations. The demand side has also been maturing gradually, moving away from commoditised services at lowest possible cost to demand for higher end solutions and measurable business value. There is a highly rationalised and competent provider base which is again one factor where India scores over other countries
- Sustainability – Industry focusing on sustainable practices – including diversity, green and corporate social responsibility
The underlying theme of 2010 has been the steady recovery from recession. Worldwide GDP, which had declined by 0.6 per cent in 2009, grew 5 per cent in 2010 and is expected to stablise at about 4.4 per cent in 2011. Developing nations continue to grow faster than the developed countries by at least three times.
IT spend is directly linked to growth in GDP and in line with this trend, IT spend in 2011 is expected to grow nearly 4 per cent. Worldwide IT spending will also benefi t from the accelerated recovery in emerging markets, which will generate more than half of all new IT spending worldwide in 2011. In 2011, growth will reflect new demand for IT goods and services, not pent-up demand from prior years. 2011 will also see a major surge in the use of private and public cloud and mobile computing on a variety of devices and through a range of new apps. Hardware is likely to grow the fastest at about 7 per cent, led by the refresh cycle in the Government sector. Shipments of app-capable, non-PC mobile devices (smartphones, media tablets) are expected to outnumber PC shipments.
IT services is expected to grow by about 3.5 per cent in 2011 and 4.5 per cent in 2012. While focus on cost control and efficiency/productivity remain, customers are also evaluating how investments in IT impact can further business goals – ROI led transformation - leading to an increase in project-based spending.
Services such as virtualisation, consolidation, and managed services that focus on ROI in the short term will drive opportunities in the market. Emerging Asian enterprises across multiple industries will continue to accelerate services spending in their efforts to challenge existing global MNCs. Organisations will look for alternative IT models - Cloud, on-demand services and SaaS – in order to reduce hardware infrastructure costs and provide scalability on demand. Worldwide packaged software revenue is estimated to reach USD 297 billion in 2011, a Y-o-Y growth of over 5 per cent, led by emerging regions, such as APAC and LATAM. These regions are expected to invest heavily in enterprise software initiatives as they continue to round out the IT infrastructure necessary to do business. Business Process Outsourcing spending is expected to be driven by analytical services, F&A and industry-specific BPO solutions.
In the future, the global IT-BPO industry is likely to go through a paradigm shift across five parameters- Markets – Growth will be driven by new markets – SMBs, Asia, public sector and government-influenced entities which will become a priority customer base
Customers – Customers will demand ‘transformative’ value propositions, that go beyond lower-cost replication; as technology creates virtual supply chains, customers will require a seamless experience across time zones and geographies; increasing demand for innovation and end-to-end transformation
Service Offerings – Offerings that are high-end, deeply embedded in customer value chains will emerge. Services and delivery will become location-agnostic leading to new opportunities such as design services in manufacturing, Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM), etc. Solutions for the domestic market will be a key focus area Talent – Government pressures to create local jobs and the need for local knowledge will alter the employee mix - a higher proportion of non-Indians with multilingual and localised capabilities. There will be a much greater focus on ongoing development of specialised skills and capabilities
Business models – Driven by a focus on expertise and intellectual property, offerings will shift from piecemeal, technology-centric applications to a range of integrated solutions and higher-end services, spanning new service lines (e.g., green IT) While developed markets constitute the largest share of IT spend, increasingly emerging markets are spearheading growth as a large consumer base becomes increasingly tech-savvy and enterprises adopt IT solutions to improve their global competitiveness. Given this scenario, the Indian supply base has begun to explore market opportunities beyond US and UK. By 2020, new segments (SMBs), new verticals (Public sector and Defence, Healthcare, Utilities, Printing and Publishing) and new geographies (BRIC) will account for 50-55 per cent growth in the addressable market. India supply base is well placed to tap this potential, with their two decade long experience, mature service capabilities, presence in almost all verticals, global footprint and an abundant talent pool.
Suitably exploiting these emerging opportunities both in the global and domestic markets can help India reach USD 130 billion in IT-BPO revenues by FY2015, a CAGR of 14 per cent. By FY2015, the Indian IT-BPO industry is expected to contribute about 7 per cent to annual GDP and create about 14.3 million employment opportunities (direct and indirect). Further, the India supply base has also begun to look for expansion across various non-metros both to control costs and have access to a large talent pool. This expansion has resulted in the development of a local talent pool and the physical and social infrastructure. The industry is now moving to rural areas creating employment, improving living standards, positively impacting career and personal development, empowering women and developing a social infrastructure, thus leading to balanced regional growth. The government will be a key driver for increased adoption of IT-based products and solutions. It has embarked on various IT-enabled initiatives including in Public services (Government to citizen services, citizen identification, and public distribution systems), Healthcare (telemedicine, remote consultation, and mobile clinics), Education (eLearning, virtual classrooms, etc) and financial service (mobile banking/payment gateways), etc. These initiatives are expected to substantially improve the economic conditions of a large, under-served population, thereby reducing the government’s fiscal burden.
However, to realise this opportunity, all stakeholders – Industry, Government, Academia and NASSCOM– will need to jointly take decisive action to develop a high calibre talent pool, continue to harness technology for inclusive growth, foster a sustainable ecosystem for research and innovation, actively work to establish India as a trusted global hub for professional services, catalyse growth in the domestic market, and ensure adequate policy support to keep the momentum strong.
