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Datamatics opens shop in Tokyo

Datamatics Limited, the Rs 2.5-billion Bombay based software major, has opened a subsidiary in Tokyo.

The initial investment is about $1million. The subsidiary is called Datamatics KK.

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This subsidiary is expected to enable Datamatics increase its focus on the Japanese market, considering that almost a third of its current revenues come from Japan.

While the initial focus will be on technical and business development through the local presence, Datamatics KK will also look at organic development of markets and revenues in the medium to long term, according to Rahul Kanodia, joint managing director, Datamatics.

"As in our other subsidiaries, the predominant advantage here would be the establishment of a local presence. We feel that the Japanese clients will be more comfortable dealing with a Japanese company than a foreign (Indian) company. Also, the subsidiary will enhance our ability to expand into the Japanese market, which has always been a key market for us,'' Kanodia has been quoted as saying.

Initially, Datamatics KK will focus on migrations and re-engineering projects, where Datamatics strategic business units are already very strong in the Japanese market.

Datamatics has already done a lot of offshore work with major Japanese companies like Itochu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo.

The subsidiary will also be looking at projects in the transportation and telecommunications market needs in Japan before leveraging the competencies of the parent company in manufacturing and ERP solutions.

Datamatics already has a development centre in Pune where it has about 30 Japanese speaking employees who help with the projects that come from Japan. These employees will be used to create an 'India office' for the Japanese market through which they will learn more about Japanese market requirements.

Most current and future projects from Japan, though, will still be handled by the Pune development centre.

"The development work will be primarily done offshore in India. This gives us a price advantage and enables the maximum utilisation of India's strengths in software development. The Japanese subsidiary will primarily handle consulting, project implementation etc which need a local presence,'' said Kanodia.

"We've tried an interesting experiment with our Pune center,'' he said. "We took people who already were proficient in Japanese and taught them to be software professionals. We found that this works better than to take software professionals and teach them a language. Software professionals would rather learn another programming language, while the language specialists exhibited very high motivation levels to become proficient in software programming.''

- Compiled from the Indian media

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