India Inc. is Twice as Fast as Japan Inc.

It took Japan Inc. more than 30 years to obtain a strong position in key U.S. industries, such as Automotive and Consumer Electronics. It will take half as long for India Inc. to do the same for service-oriented industries with IT leading the charge.

The Bottom Line: India’s rise in IT and other areas means U.S.-based companies must radically change their view of competition and what becomes strategic domestic employment.

What It Means: The term India Inc. has been thrown around in the popular press for the last year as an embodiment of the new competition arising from India in IT and other areas. For manufacturers, this has a similar resonance of Japan Inc., a term that came about in the 1970s as Japan attacked key U.S. manufacturing industries, including Automotive, Steel, and Consumer Electronics. Unfortunately, many U.S. and European companies continue to underestimate the impact of India Inc. and have not made the needed changes to their business and employment models.

The fastest change is occurring with the major software vendors that have moved much of their core product development to India. For example, nearly all of SAP’s BW product development and much of NetWeaver resides in India. Oracle and PeopleSoft have accelerated deployment of Research and Development (R&D) and support resources in India; Oracle has more than 6,400 people now employed in India and plans to have nearly 10,000 by the end of 2005.

Some companies, such as Kana, have taken an extreme view and have sent all R&D to India. Venture capitalists require that any startup have a plan and capability to deploy R&D in India. While technology-oriented companies have embraced offshoring, most end-user organizations continue to be cautious about how much and how fast they can offshore IT operations. In the next few years, however, their internal IT cost models will prove too high and force them to change.

With this hypergrowth in job openings comes an equal focus in education. Potential IT workers are not waiting for jobs to come their way, but are instead fostering a fast-growing base of colleges and trade schools offering comprehensive and inexpensive technical education and certification. Local and national newspapers are full of ads for such training.

Like Japan Inc., one of the initial attractions of India Inc. is low-cost labor. Ironically, India offers lower cost labor than Japan ever did, but higher quality than is delivered by many companies today. This paradox is not readily understood and is why many U.S. and European companies continue to ignore the potential of India Inc. Indian software companies hold the highest number of Level 4 and 5 Software Engineering Institute-Capability Maturity Model certifications, which is the software equivalent of Six Sigma certification for defects in manufacturing.

Along with this enhanced quality comes enhanced delivery of value. The perception that India is only capable of low-cost, tactical work is as true as the false perception that the Japanese cars of the 1980s were cheap U.S. knockoffs. The establishment of low-cost offshore delivery centers in India for traditional IT service providers / Systems Integrators (SIs) is well underway, as are business processing outposts for all the services industries (Financial, Telecommunications, Legal, Engineering, etc.).

And unlike many of their U.S. and European counterparts, upwards of 50% of all SI/ Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) jobs are profitably taken with a fixed price bid. The high stock price of many Indian offshoring companies, as well as pre-tax margins in excess of 20%, illustrate that these companies have management expertise and execution quality.

Conclusion: The availability of inexpensive and reliable network and computing technology implies that any job or task that does not require the physical presence of a person can be sent offshore. India followed by others, including China, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, are creating a sophisticated pool of highly specialized and educated workers who have shown the ability and willingness to deliver high-quality, low-cost work. Using many of Japan Inc.’s techniques of continuous improvement, quality circles, and process innovation, India Inc.’s 30% annual growth in IT services is being replicated in other service industries. U.S. and European companies need to reevaluate their worldwide employment models to ensure that they can benefit from India Inc. rather than be consumed by it. U.S. automakers and consumer electronics firms ignored Japan Inc. for decades until it was too late to recover; IT and other service providers do not have nearly as much time to recover from a similar misjudgment.