Indian service providers scoop up market share

Top 10 Indian service providers have seen 19.9 per cent growth in 2010, compared with just 5.8 per cent for the global top 10 providers

The top 10 Indian IT service providers have continued to increase their global market share, with a combined 19.9 per cent growth in 2010 compared with the top 10 IT service providers globally growing 5.8 per cent, according to analyst firm Gartner.

The total global market saw a 3.1 per cent market share.

Eight of the top 10 providers reported revenue of more than $1bn (£0.6bn), with cumulative revenue representing almost 50 per cent of India's offshore industry in 2010.

"The top five India-based providers grew by $4.5bn in 2010," said Arup Roy, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"While the Indian providers constitute only a small percentage of the total industry, collectively the group has had a resounding impact on the market.

"Of the top 10 Indian providers, only Mahindra Satyam reported a decline in 2010 revenue, (-10.2 per cent), as the company was still coming out of the accounting scandal unearthed in 2009," said Roy.

"The top five providers represented 93.7 per cent of the growth achieved by the top 10 as a group. This demonstrates that the leaders are pulling away from the pack and that market-share gains by the smaller players are more likely to come as a result of consolidation and not organically," he added.

Top five providers in 2010

TCS
TCS is the biggest of the Indian providers and grew 18 per cent between 2009 and 2010. It offers full-spectrum IT services, with investments in expanding applications, infrastructure and business process outsourcing portfolio.

Infosys
Infosys showed a slightly disappointing performance in 2010, according to Gartner. It faced a hypercompetitive market and aggressive sales strategies from the competition, which made its higher-value services offering look expensive.

Wipro
Wipro performed less well than its peers, posting 16.4 per cent growth, and in its most recent quarter results came in below expectations. But Gartner also said it has a solid integrated service portfolio approach, good standardisation and reuse, and a new focus on expanding system integration services.

Cognizant
Cognizant posted the highest growth in 2010 (40.1 per cent) of the top 10 India-based providers. It recovered from the recession quickly and its strategy of continuing to invest throughout the recession, combined with strong account management and local presence, paid off in 2010, according to Gartner. It invested in three key areas and this differentiated it from its competition. These areas were: operational capabilities; industry and business process capabilities; and relationship management.

HCL
HCL posted 26.7 per cent growth in 2010. The company has focused on transparency with internal and external stakeholders by empowering its employees to be innovative and fostering their employee first and customer second policy. HCL's strategy of aggressively pursuing contracts that combine infrastructure and application management into a single framework helped it capture more integrated service deals in 2010.