China will be a serious threat: Premji

PUNE: With China set to join the lucrative IT bandwagon Indian engineers will

soon have a run for their money, said Wipro chairman, Azim Premji on

`Leadership' at a meet organized by CII in Pune.

"With 200,000 quality engineers entering the market every year, compared

to India's 185,000, China will be a serious competition to our IT professionals.

China may be four to five years behind India in terms of quality, technology and

project management capabilities but in two to three years' time, the country

will pose a serious challenge in the IT field," Premji said.

"China is competing with us in Japan at 60 per cent of Indian prices.

They are four years behind us in quality technology and software management, but

two to three years from now, they'll give a run for our money,'' he said.

As for the hardware industry, he expressed pessimism by stating that India

lacked a world-class infrastructure to support this industry and hence had

little chance in competing at the global level.

Dwelling on his success, a modest Premji attributed it to good luck and

`being in the right industry at the right time'. In a highly competitive world,

adopting innovative means to market and conduct one’s business are some of the

major factors for success. This apart, the real challenge lay in transforming

creative energy into viable business application, he said.

Responding to a query on the reason for flight of talent from Wipro, Premji

said, there wasn’t much to worry about since we have developed leadership in

the organization to fill this gap and the movement of people has in no way

affected our performance.

Wipro expects to record Rs 3000 crore worth of software exports this year, he

added.