IT to grow 14% in FY11, offer 1.5 lakh jobs: Nasscom

Excerpts from India Business Hour on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » RELATED NEWS NASSCOM presents Budget '10 wishlist to govt Will Obama's anti-outsourcing tirade impact Indian IT?

National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) predicts that the industry will show a growth of 13-14% in FY11 and offer up to 1,50,000 jobs.

In FY10, export revenues from products and services in grew by 5.5% touching almost the USD 50 billion mark. The Indian market saw a growth of about 12% to USD 14.3 billion.

FY10 winners

BFSI did not show a very significant revenue jump. It had shown early signs of recovery but the key takers were retail, telecom, infrastructure and engineering. In fact, engineering and product development services touched about USD 10 billion - the maximum we have seen so far. The government IT spend was also quite significant - USD 3.5 billion.  

While US and Europe were the key revenue drivers, Asia-Pacific (APAC) region showed a growth of 10% vis-à-vis last year. In fact, it is the fastest growing region in the last two years.

Outlook for FY11

 The industry expects a growth of about 13-15% in terms of export revenues. The domestic market is expected to grow by about 15-17%.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Pramod Bhasin, Chairman, NASSCOM and President & CEO, Genpact spoke about the road ahead for the IT sector.

Below is a verbatim transcript of the interview. Also watch the video.

Q: What is the basis on which you have projected such confident numbers?

A: The outlook we are forecasting is a 13-15% growth for 2010-11 that compared to a roughly 5% growth in 2009-10. So it's virtually a doubling or tripling of the overall growth numbers.

Q: Which are the verticals that you see driving this growth, which are the ones that you are betting on the most as far as the next 12 months are concerned?

A: Banking and financial services has continued to be a growth driver even in this downturn and I think even going forward banking financial services just by the nature of the industry will continue to be a growth driver. There are other areas also which will grow fast even though they may not be a large amount of dollar revenues today. So healthcare, utilities, retails - these are all areas, which will grow fast. Along with that diversification of products in geographies is really helping.

So expansion in APAC, China , domestically demand in India, the rest of Asia will continue to grow even faster than the average growth rates that we are forecasting both last year and the year forward.

Products - there are new areas coming up, in engineering there is new areas, in R&D there is a new opportunities and new companies coming up all the time. In IT Product Development at a recent conclave that Nasscom had they had over 700 different companies playing what they were doing. So it's very exciting right now because of the range of opportunities and areas that we can expand into.

Q: Give us the sense of job market, last one year has been challenging for the IT sector, talking about the job market. So what is your forecast for hiring for the coming year?

A: We think versus 90,000 jobs that were created last year, we think we will increase hiring by 150,000 jobs and add to that fact we believe for every one job that we do in direct hiring, there are another 3-4 jobs or opportunities that are created around us in infrastructure etc. So hiring is back; we were net hirers earlier and we will continue to be one of the largest creators of employment in this country.

When the government talks about inclusive growth we are very proud to be one of the key champions of inclusive growth because our employees come from all over India to our centres and the number of centres we have has also increased to nearly 54 centre across India, so there are very exciting developments.