""At my age I do what Mark Twain did. I get my
daily paper, look at the obituaries page—if I’m not there, I carry on as
usual."
—Partick Moore
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Share of exports in Top 20 numbers slipped 1%—as key exporters fell out
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HW exports was mixed—Celetron crashed, Moser Baer topped growth charts
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It was BFSI and telecom that led in enterprise IT spend for the second year running, but government spending also showed an increase—it was up 3%
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JFM was the best quarter, accounting for over 29% of overall Top 20 sales
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It was cautious optimism that Indian IT entered fiscal 2002-03
with—there were some signs of an end to the extended slowdown, and the past
few quarters indicated a perceptible, though gradual, upward march. As the year
progressed, however, it became evident that there would be no dramatic
turnaround. If sluggish enterprise buying cycles and seething price pressures
didn’t rub that in hard enough, the industry had extraneous elements like the
Iraq war and SARS to contend with. End of year, a revival had happened—but the
rate of growth was not feverish enough...
But let’s leave aside an environmental post mortem for now.
In fiscal 2002-03, some big moves were made by Indian IT’s biggies, and that
reflected on overall trends, on revenues, on rankings, and on brand IT India
Inc. There were three entrants in the DQ Top 20 club—Microsoft, CMC and
Mahindra BT forced their way in, with Celetron (which had its worst year and saw
revenues slip to nearly one-third) and Silverline made way for them. The third
vacancy came from the HP-Compaq merger—as they became one entity, a sot was
created for a third entrant.
Dataquest changed some of its ranking processes this year as
well. The revenues of companies like Intel, Cisco and Microsoft were
consolidated along with their development centers in India—this reflected on
their growth numbers, which would have been lower otherwise. In other broad
trends, the three big distis—Tech Pacific, Redington India and Ingram Micro
slipped one rung each, though their growth rates were higher than the previous
year. The domestic market showed strong signs of a bounceback—and this
reflected in the entry of CMC into the Top 20 for fiscal 2002-03.
Hardware exporters had mixed fortunes—while Celetron fell out of club,
Moser Baer jumped five slots to #15 and was the top growth company (53%) for the
second year in a row, following up on its 102% growth in fiscal 2001-02. The
only Top 20 company to show negative growth—NIIT.
Team DQ
