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British gates wide open for outsourcing

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CIOL Bureau
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MUMBAI: Despite reports to the contrary, the British Government would not be putting any tough barriers on off shoring to India, since Indian competition would ultimately benefit the British business climate only. This was stated by Stephen Timms, the UK minister of state for energy, e-commerce and postal services during his address at the inaugural session of Nasscom 2004 in Mumbai.



He exhorted that more and more Indian companies in the ICT sector to make the leap from a domestic company to an international investor and preferably consider UK as the venue. Apart from traditional advantages such as having fewer regulations compared to other EU countries, one of the lowest corporate tax rates he also said that the country’s legal framework would be comfortable for the Indians. He stated that UK offers one of the best academia-industry interfaces for R&D work and could act as an ideal springboard for entry into mainland Europe. While global giants like Microsoft, IBM and HP have taken advantage of the R&D facilities in UK, Timms urged Indian companies to follow suit.



According to Timms, the ICT market in UK is currently at 5 billion pounds, and attracts 14% of the world's total FDI, which makes it the world's second largest FDI location after the US and the largest in Europe. Out of 450 Indian companies currently in the UK, nearly 75% are from the ICT sector only and Timms expects the number to grow over the next few months. "The past between India and UK is closely linked, and the future would be through hi-tech collaboration," hoped Timms. One more UK advantage was the recent proposal to have more university focus on areas like parallel computing, artificial intelligence and multimedia.



Timms also brought out one interesting information, which in today's world of multimedia could turn out to be a useful business avenue for Indian companies. UK currently has 30% of the world's computer gaming market share, which makes it the third biggest gaming market in the world and the biggest in Europe. Three of the world's top selling games were also developed in the UK.



CyberMedia News Service

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