Software firms ready to tap Japanese market

Y P Rajesh

BANGALORE: India's booming computer software industry is looking eastward in

a bid to tap the emerging market for its services in Japan.

Industry officials said that Indian software services firms were gearing

themselves up to do more business in Japan as they looked to expand beyond their

traditional markets in the United States and Europe.

The process is expected to get a helping hand from a visit by Japanese Prime

Minister Yoshiro Mori, who lands Monday evening in India's technology capital

Bangalore on the first leg of a four-day visit to the country.

Mori will visit two of India's most celebrated software firms headquartered

in Bangalore–Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd.–and is expected to

invite India's software industry to do more business in Japan.

"Nothing has prevented us from doing more business with Japan. It's just

that the market there is maturing now," says National Association of

Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) president Dewang Mehta.

"We have done a lot of Y2K work in Japan and our software exports to

Japan are expected to touch $300 million in 2000-01 (April-March) from $160

million (the previous year)."

Mehta said Japan is estimated to need one million software engineers over the

next five years and Nasscom was launching a special project to train Indian

engineers in Japanese.

Earlier this month, Japanese Vice-Finance Minister for International Affairs

Haruhiko Kuroda said his country hoped to overcome a shortage of computer

software professionals by recruiting Indian engineers.

Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) puts this

shortage currently at 200,000.

On a visit to Bangalore, Kuroda said that Japan accounted for only four per

cent of India's software exports, worth $4 billion during 1999-2000

(April-March), while the United States accounted for 60 per cent and Europe 25

per cent.

Cultural hurdles



India's software industry sees software for embedded systems, e-commerce,
telecommunication, design and the banking sector as the major opportunity areas

in Japan.

But there are stiff cultural and policy hurdles in the path of Indian firms

that wish to do business in Japan.

"All the documentation passed on to us as design specification in a

project is in Japanese. It has to be translated into English, worked on and

translated back to Japanese," Soumitra Ghosh, head of worldwide marketing

at Wipro's software business, told Reuters.

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.