A Toast to Growth

For the world it may be tougher to find than the G-spot, but this G-word is

no stranger to Indian tech. We grow faster than the US or EU tech markets-every

year. Even when the world's tech spending went sharply negative three years

ago, India's own market growth was flat...while its services exports grew at a

healthy clip.

But what's most heartening about the growth this year is that once again,

it's consistent. For the second year running, the domestic market's grown as

much as exports (something unprecedented until last year).

Which means that the domestic slice of the industry pie has really, really

stopped shrinking against services exports. From 87% in 1990 to 50% in 2000, the

domestic market dropped to 36% of the total IT pie in 2003-but it's stayed

there. For two years now.

Almost every segment grew between 25 and 40%, from systems to peripherals to

software and services. And on the exports front, from BPO to software services.

In last month's editorial, I said this would be the year of Mobility for

India. Well, last year was the foundation. Laptops moved up from trifling 3% of

annual PC sales to a 7%-and counting. I really do believe that they'll more

than double yet again this year-to 15%. Fueled by low prices-starting with

the sub-40K models-and connectivity, and email, and mobile applications. And

the less-than-100K base of connected PDAs of the Blackberry (and O2, Palm Treo,

T910i, Nokia 9500) genre will double, too. Last August, the TCS mega-IPO set the

tone for the markets: a Rs 5,000 crore issue oversubscribed nearly eight times.

And in this new financial year, tech media house (and Dataquest publisher)

CyberMedia's IPO, a relatively modest 17 crore, was nearly four time

oversubscribed (the Rs 10 share, offered at Rs 60, opened on day one at over Rs

80 and closed over Rs 100, staying in the 100-150 range subsequently).

And finally, to support IT's "traditionally" strong verticals of

finance (BFSI), telecom and tech services, e-governance is finally getting up to

steam. Slowly. But certainly.

No, we are not back to the heady days of the dot com boom. It's different.

There is caution underlying the euphoria. Whether it's in controlled spending

and questions on RoI in the enterprise; or a great deal of financial caution

among the reseller channels: credit checks, hard negotiations every inch of the

way, a tight focus on margins; or better use of communications, conferencing and

low-cost airlines... this is not a boom before a bust.

That's why we can finally pop the bubbly, and raise a toast. We've found

our G-spot: sustainable growth.

Prasanto K Roy