Skoch predicts good times ahead

Gaurav Patra / New Delhi

Skoch Summit 2003, Skoch’s annual IT industry conference coincided with the Skoch Challengers 2003 Awards. Sixth in the series, the Summit has assumed special importance in view of the persisting uncertainties concerning the slump in the IT industry, trade barriers in export territories, the Digital Divide and international hostilities.

At the event, Skoch Consultancy Services CEO Sameer Kochhar, also released an industry analysis report entitled Browser 2002, which observed an encouraging market growth during the last year. The report noted that despite a slowdown in the global business environment, the Indian IT industry has shown remarkable resilience to record an upsurge in almost every segment.

According to the report, the industry experienced an overall growth of 9 percent in 2002; the domestic market stood at Rs 23,774 crore, as users in government, banking and finance, education and telecom contributed in a major way to the growth of Indian IT industry.

The Skoch report observed that though the Internet and networking segments disappointed the industry, PC and software exports recorded a 14 percent and 30 percent growth respectively. Kochhar informed that the retail segment grew by 44 percent notching 8 lakh PCs. The report also projects a good period ahead unless the Iraq war continues for more than a month.

While Kochhar shared his concerns about the SME segment, Dr DB Phatak, professor and head of KReSIT, Mumbai, who also inaugurated the summit, shared his views about his vision and where he wishes to see the Indian IT industry by the year 2006. He opined that a concerted medium term approach could help India consolidate its position on the global IT map and achieve its IT penetration objectives in the domestic market.

Other speakers at the summit included SCO vice president Avinash K Verma, STPI director Manas Patnaik, DIT joint secretary S Chandrashekhar, Dr Gulshan Rai of Ernet and S Ramakrishnan, senior director at DIT.

Challengers 2003
Skoch also used this forum to confer awards of excellence to leading IT companies. The uniqueness of these awards is that companies were judged on the basis of their potential to perform in future, rather than their past performance. Besides their ability to grow faster than their contenders, Skoch analysts selected the companies on the basis of their potential to double marketshare in the next three years or achieve a significant milestone faster than others. Performance recognition through this year’s Challengers Awards emphasise the fact that despite persisting tech slowdown, companies have a tremendous potential to grow in the Indian market.

Challengers 2003 Awardees

• SCO group bagged the award in the Operating System category as the company registered a 5 percent marketshare in the local server market of 45,640 units in 2002.
• AMD emerged winner in the CPU segment, by selling 10 percent of the 1,79,704 CPUs in 2002.
• With a 9 percent sliver valued at Rs. 22.48 crore, Oracle received the award for the enterprise applications market.
• HP led the PC retail category emerging leader as well as challenger due to its potential to double its share over the next three years in a highly fragmented market, ruled largely by assemblers. HP topped the list of contenders with a 7 percent share, selling 60,254 PCs through the retail network, out of a total of 8,60,782 machines that went through this channel last year.
• In the networking space worth Rs 1,850 crore, Enterasys grabbed 6 percent, amounting to Rs 111 crore.
• Canon bagged the award in the Inkjet printers segment, selling 15 percent of inkjet printers in a market size of 5,80,963 units, though the total number of printers-including laser and DMP—sold in India during 2002 were more than 1 million.
• Samsung was the only company to win two awards in the ‘fastest growing companies’ list. Skoch projects that the Korean major—given its strong ownership of the component base that constitutes a very large percentage of the PC—will become the fastest company to sell over 1,00,000 PCs. Similarly, Samsung is poised to excel in the laser printer segment by becoming the fastest seller of 1,00,000 laser printers.
• ITES provider Daksh was selected as another fastest growing company, which will become the fastest cross-over company from SME space (< $ 50 million) to large space (> $ 50 million).

The highlight of the Awards ceremony was the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ conferred to P K Sandal, founder president of Telecom equipment manufacturers Association (TEMA) and National Associations of Small & Medium IT companies of India (NASMEIT). He was selected for his role spanning over many years to ceaselessly promote the high-tech SME sector in India. Sandal has been fighting for SMEs for the last four decades.

Dr D B Phatak lights the inaugural lamp with Sameer Kochhar	Sameer Kochhar presenting the Annual IT Industry Analysis
Shekhar Dasgupta of Oracle receiving the award from Dr Phatak	P K Sandell receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award
Sanjeev Keskar of AMD after receiving the award	Ravi Agarwal, HP receiving the award from Sandeep Khosla, CEO, BPD-Indian Express
Dr S Ramakrishnan, Senior Director, DIT	Princy Bhatnagar of Samsung receiving the award
Alan Grant, President and CEO of Canon India and Alok Bharadwaj of Canon India	Dr D B Phatak presenting the award to Avinash Verma of SCO