Tata Consultancy Services is bullish on China and the strategic partnership it has forged with the Chinese government and Microsoft to provide IT outsourcing services and solutions is to be operational early next year to scale up the company's operations, S Ramadorai, CEO and MD of the Indian software giant said.
Ramadorai, who is in Bejing, heading a high-level Nasscom delegation of CEOs to China, said that the TCS-Sino-India Cooperative Office-Microsoft venture is expected to start functioning in first quarter of 2006.
"The whole idea is how to you scale it up and how to take our operations in China forward," Ramadorai said.
The joint venture to be located in Beijing's Zhongguancun Software Park, will provide IT outsourcing services and solutions to all major worldwide markets particularly US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region including China's domestic market.
The key objective of the global initiative is to build the new venture as a role model for the growing Chinese software industry, he said.
"We believe in long-term commitment to the Chinese market," he said while noting that TCS has been operating in China since 2002 and delivering services and solutions to its global, regional, and domestic customers from its Global Delivery Centre at Hangzhou with the help of over 250 engineers.
TCS has also set up a 100 per cent owned subsidiary called Tata Information Technology (Shanghai) Co Ltd, for its China operations, which is based in the eastern metropolis, Shanghai.
Commenting on India-China cooperation in the IT sector, Ramadorai said the two Asian giants represent two of the fastest-growing economies in the world and their e-business ambitions are increasingly intersecting.
"Together both countries can be a powerful global force if we work together to tap the growing global opportunities," he said. He noted that often the customers of TCS asked him about the strengths of China in outsourcing.
"I always tell them that potentially China could emerge as a leading outsourcing destination -- the destination of the Chinese leaders and its people, the entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese professionals and its strengths in hardware all provide it with all the building blocks to emerge as a key destination," Ramadorai said.
"When asked about competition between India and China, I always maintain that we need to collaborate first and compete later. If we can work together to grow the share of global sourcing in the total IT market, all of us can win," he said.
Ramadorai said there are several benefits for India and China working together in the IT sector.
For China, it would give access to big mature IT players with domain experience, it would bring knowledge about proven world-class process maturity/quality standards, it would give access to existing multinational clients, Chinese companies can avail of the services of Indian training companies in the IT training sector.
Further, Chinese IT companies can gain project management skills, they could accrue benefits of world-class engineering design and embedded systems capability as well as un-bundle the semiconductor value chain as they could focus on low-cost manufacturing with flexible Indian design skills.
For the Indian software industry, the Chinese market could provide a gateway to largely untapped market of Japan and the Asia Pacific region, could gain access to the huge domestic and export market, provide business continuity and de-risking for multinational companies.
Indian companies could also use the China market to get access to multinational companies moving into China and they could use China as part of global delivery chain.
The Indian software industry would also access to talent and large pool of Chinese science and technical graduates.
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