Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Alok Bharadwaj senior vice president, Canon India

Impact: Global meltdown, actually speaking, has a limited connection with the Indian market growth for consumer products. India has to still grow for many years at a faster rate to emerge as a saturated market. The economic growth in India is dependent more on macro economic factors like inflation, loan interest rate, etc. India is predominantly a young country with huge potential to grow.

The meltdown has caused a lot of worries and anxiety among the masses. But the most important implication has been on the risk appetite of the company. The risk appetites of most organizations have gone down and hence extension of credit is becoming lesser. Consider if bankers give lesser loans, then it is going to be tough for organizations to survive. Loans need to be given and there must be liquidity in the economy, otherwise the growth will come to a standstill

Another grave implication of the continued meltdown would be that of the flight of the dollar. An outflow of foreign institutional investment from the equity market is a matter of concern. Foreign institutional investors, who need to retrench assets in order to cover losses in their home countries, are seeking havens of safety in an uncertain environment and have become major sellers in the Indian market. One of the reasons also being that the risk appetite of many companies has gone down.

Challenges: India needs to keep a control on the inflation in the country. With lower inflation, banks would provide loans at lower interest rates and, therefore, people will be able to deploy more capital and in turn induce economic growth.

It needs to be understood that India is a land of opportunities and there is ample labor. The only scarcity is that of money. Being a developing economy, we need to welcome foreign investments. Foreign investments need to increase in India and there is no reason why there should be a descent of dollars from the country. Even in a situation of crisis, the dollars must come back as India is slated to grow at a fast rate in the near future. It is not possible for any economy around the world to make a portfolio without India being a part of it when the investment is made keeping in view return on investment. Therefore it is essential for India to make itself an attractive destination for foreign investments.

The challenge lies ahead of every one of us. We need to make sure we plan ahead of time. People need to purchase what is essential to them. Employees need to develop skills in order to be hired and have a need for them generated so that their requirements in their companies are high. Investors need to be wary of where they are investing and need to wait for the right time to invest.

People need to be strong and keep in mind that this phase will end soon. They do not need to panic. I personally believe that India will be a part of the solution to get back the whole economic crisis back on track.

Phaneesh Murthy CEO, iGATE Global

Impact: Revenues are flat to down; hiring is nonexistent and the company is on a dramatic cost control mode.

Challenges: The top three challenges are carrying all our people; maintaining a reasonable level of profitability and identifying those areas and services which in the short term can help us with revenues.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: I believe that companies in the US will look at more ways of moving out of fixed cost resources making variable cost and output-based pricing models to become more prevalent.

Alok Ohrie President, EMC India & SAARC

Impact: 2008 marked our sixth year of double digit growth. Based on everything we see, EMCs best estimate is that in 2009 global IT spending will decline as a percentage in the mid to high single digits compared with 2008. Within this environment, high priority technologies and quick RoI solutions will certainly do relatively better, benefiting us.

Challenges: In the short term, it is evident that the global economic activity will be weak in 2009 and global IT spending will be under pressure. However, things may start to settle out in the second half as everyone adjusts to the new economic reality as visibility into the rest of 2009 improves. In addition, activities like government stimulus packages and companies being further along in completing their restructuring may also begin to have a positive impact.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: Among our customers, many companies are evaluating their IT infrastructure during the current economic crisis and becoming more open to innovative technologies that will provide them better cost advantage. Though the overall IT spend may decline this year. We are quite optimistic that the markets we serve including storage, security, content management and virtualization will perform slightly better than the overall IT market.

Vishnu R Dusad CEO & MD, Nucleus Software

Impact: The global financial crisis has truly extended to the entire world and almost all countries are reporting lower growth or recessionary economic conditions. We believe there are opportunities as well as constraints and we are exploring different business models to effectively meet customer expectations on cost effective business solutions.

Despite the global recession we have not lost any clients, although new clients are looking for more assurance before placing an order. There are all kinds of scenariosin some cases customers are expecting a very low price to some expecting deferred price.

Looking at the cycle now as compared to a normal cycle, there is not much of a difference due to the market environment except for the last few months where many things were going on. Firstly, there was the year ending taking place and everybody was just going slow at the end of the year. There were some delays but I think things have started looking much brighter now. Everybody is trying to bring in optimization wherever there are gaps and wherever they can see value.

Challenges: It is a difficult time for the industry on the whole. Our focus on quality continues. We have put special focus on Lean thinking and have the processes modified and rolled out for deployment; we are conducting frequent training sessions on standard processes to further strengthen it. The Lean and Kaizen initiatives have been initiated at Nucleus to improve productivity and performance of employees.

As a part of enhancement, we are also ensuring that our core methodology is based on the lean principles, which are essentially about ensuring that the customer value, as defined by the customer, remains the focus of the organization and any wastages in the value stream, as seen by the customer, are minimized or eliminated or brought to zero.

We have reduced and eliminated certain costs and have been able to keep the expenses in check owing to our unique business model (30% business and 70% IP) that also allows moving people at their/our own convenience to either side of the business as per requirement.

Page(s)   1  2  3  4  5