Brajeshwar

I was reading this glaring article in Mumbai Mirror, a Mumbai based Newspaper from Times of India. If it of course, an undeniable fact that India is emerging as the global back-office of the Internet-Technology Industry and the backbone to this is the skilled yet economical workforce it has in abundance. However, industry experts opine that it will take ages before it can catch up with the global giants in terms of productivity. Research and Studies have revealed that, an American Techie is about 10 times more productive than their Indian counterparts.

Among the top five Indian IT Companies – TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam Computer and HCL Tech – TCS is the biggest in the terms of annual revenue, but Wipro steals the show in terms of revenue per employee. But even Wipro’s per employee revenue of just over $51,000 gets dwarfed when compared to the fortune 500-listed IT companies in the US, where an employee contributes at least $100,000 to the company’s annual turnover.

The figure for TCS stood at close to $48,000, with annual turnover of $4.3 billion and head count of over 89,400 employees at the end of last fiscal. Wipro had annual revenues of $3.5 billion and total head count of over 67,800 people last year.

Infosy’s per employee contribution was close to $43,000 with a total revenue of $3.1 billion and over 72,000 employees. The average revenue per employee (ARPE) of the five largest it earners in India stood at $42,000 last fiscal year, against $410,000 in the top five in the US – HP, IBM, DELL, Sun Microsystems and EDS. Each employee brings in a whopping $587,555 at Hewlett Packard (HP), which recorded over $91.6 billion in revenue last year with a total head count of 156,000 employees.

Incidentally, US giants like HP, IBM and DELL have a significant portion of their head count in India. The market observers believe that factors like high attrition rates of over 12 per cent and under-untilisation of resources are acting as a major hurdle to achieve high employee productivity for Indian firms. In the US, California-based HP is followed by IBM at the second with $91.4 billion of revenue, which results in ARPE of about $257,000 with 355,766 employees.

World’s second largest PC market DELL occupies the third position with revenue of over $57 billion and has managed APRE of over $693,000 with a total of 82,290 employees last year. Even the fourth and fifth highest earners – Texas-based Eletronic Data Systems (over $21 billion) and Sun Microsystems ($13 billion) have each employee contributing about $163,000 and $344,000 respectively.

However, it may be noted that the Americans were way ahead of India in the IT field, India started off IT in a big way recently. Though there are lot of catching-up to do, India is on a sprint mode and is catching up fast.