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| Edited By: Amit Arora |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 16, 2018, 06:01 AM IST
At the first day at office as CEO and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT firm by headcount, N Chandrasekaran sets a target of two years for the firm’s China business to take off.
TCS had set up its Latin America and China delivery centres around the same time in 2002. While it now employs about 6,000 people in Latin America, the strength in China is 1,500.
“China and Latin America came up around the same time. But the two geographies are different. China ramp-up has been slow on language and cultural aspects. We do not put revenue numbers to start with in a region. More important aspects are establishing a robust delivery model, building a reference customer base, establishing a team etc,” he said. “Our target now is to build reference clients in China. We already have two large clients in China. We have signed one and about to sign another,” he said.
In Latin America, TCS has delivery centres in Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile and others. The firm has a number of big clients in Latin America. “The domestic market is huge in Latin America as compared with China,” Chandrasekaran said.
Besides ramping up China business, TCS will continue its focus on other emerging markets. “In the recent recession, the US and Europe businesses were lagging. But we did not see any problem in the emerging markets. This will be a major focus area for us,” Chandrasekaran said.
The TCS CEO said that besides the firm’s investment in R&D and product development, attention will remain on developing platform based solutions. “We have four platforms and we are looking at increasing scale in those. We will then have more platforms as well,” Chandrasekaran said. TCS has set up two centres in Cincinnati, USA, to develop solutions specific to healthcare and government sectors there.
Nitin Padmanabhan, analyst with broking firm Centrum Broking, said, “I am bullish on TCS’ acquisition of Diligenta that provides platform based solutions to the insurance sector. Even the Citigroup Global Services acquisition is seeing a lot of traction.”
On observation that TCS has to match rival IT firm Infosys’ valuation, Chandrasekaran said, “We need to set the valuation part right. We are transparent to our shareholders, we are focused on margins. That will happen eventually.” While Bangalore based Infosys Technologies is valued at about $26billion, TCS is pegged at about $24billion.
