After successfully completing India's census project for 2001 ahead of schedule, information technology company CMC Ltd is all geared up to bid for similar projects across the world including in the United States, and also plans to hire about 500 professionals in the current financial year.
"We have successfully completed one of the world's largest census project using the Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR). And we can now leverage this to bag other census projects around the world in future," CMC managing director and CEO R Ramanan told reporters in New Delhi on Friday.
He said the company was seriously looking at bidding for the US census in 2010, and is in the process of identifying partners for this project.
"There is a huge scope of work in this kind of a project, starting from system integration, software customisation, development of tools and even servicing," Ramanan said.
The company, which has over 18 per cent of its revenues coming from overseas projects, is bullish that in another couple of years its revenues from abroad would contribute about 30 per cent.
"We have bagged projects in Kuwait, Bahrain, Kenya, etc. If this project flow continues, we can have a revenue mix of 30:70 in the next couple of years," he added.
The company is also planning to open additional marketing centres in the US, Europe, West Asia, Africa and in CIS countries.
CMC, a Tata group company, is also on an expansion mode within the country and is setting up a new development centre at Salt Lake in Kolkata, with a capacity for 500 people.
Elaborating on the Indian census project, concluded recently, CMC said the size of the order was pegged at about Rs 23-24 crore (Rs 230-240 million).
CMC had partnered with Israel's Top Image System and Kodak India Ltd for the project.
The project involved processing of 228 million census forms collected from households all over India. The processing of 228 million forms was to be completed in a span of two years by scanning and ICR of forms.
CMC completed the project in August, 2003 -- five months ahead of the deadline -- Ramanan said.
Meanwhile, the additional hiring of 400-500 professionals would increase the company's headcount to about 4,000 professionals.
CMC's new Salt Lake facility in Kolkata would be operational in a year's time, he pointed out.
Asked about the status of CMC after TCS goes for a float, he said, "After the float there are two possibilities -- it becomes the part of the company or it continues to operate as an independent entity."
"There are merits for both. At this point, we find that CMC and TCS are working very closely and synergising each other," he said.
