Indian IT manufacturers should become global players

BANGALORE: The time has come for Indian IT manufacturers to establish themselves as global players, Pradeep Gupta, chairman & managing director of the CyberMedia Group said.

Referring to business challenges, he said maintaining and improving global competitiveness and faster time to market, integrating with software solutions, cost advantage, seasonality and manufacturing close to the market were the factors which would help Indian manufacturers compete in the global scenario.

Gupta was speaking on Building a Global Competitive Manufacturing Industry in India at the Texas Instruments Developer Conference here.

He also hinted at factors such as providing value-added services, providing low-end jobs and repeating the success of software export in hardware export, which would help India to become a global player.

Speaking on the changing landscape in the past decade he said that imports were the norms till 1975 and then the industry focussed on indegenous manufacturing till 1985. This screw driver technology continued for the whole decade till 1995. However this resulted in negative value add and high tariffs.

He said that liberalization opened up the Indian market and disinvestments post'95 saw lowering of tariff barriers and software exports became effective. It also proved the world that manufacturing leadership was possible in India citing Moser Baer's success as example.

Summing up his points, he said that Indian manufacturing industry has reengineered itself in terms of automotive, IT, process and quality standards on par with global requirements. He was positive that in the next five years there will be a sea change in the manufacturing sector in India.