This is a huge market to be tapped. Our challenge is to work closely with the Indian companies, so that they can hand over fixed costs and non-core areas to companies like BT to manage, as they focus on their core competencies.

Who are your local competitors?

BT is the only global network IT service provider with the highest number of connecting points and dual nodes across Mumbai, New Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and a customer network management centre (CNOC) in Pune that not only serves India but multi-site corporate customers in Asia Pacific. With our licences, we can now provide local billing. In India, this service will be our biggest differentiator. These services and capabilities are pretty significant when you compare them with our global competitors and hence we are definitely ahead of them.

As Indian corporates are currently not our core area of focus, we do not have competitors in the local market.

How many customers do you have in India?

Some of our MNC customers include Reuters, Cisco, Unilever, Standard Chartered, ZTE and PepsiCo. We serve all the big names in the IT/BPO space like Infosys, Wipro and Tech Mahindra etc.

Do you think we’ll be able to sustain growth in BPO and IT sector? And do you see China as a threat to India?

The IT & BPO sector growth story is poised to reach new heights and will achieve its ambitious target of $60 billion in exports by 2010. The China model is based on fulfilling mainly their domestic demand while India is more focused on exports and hence there is a greater demand for internationally-focused networked IT services—which is our strength. Both China and India will share the focus.

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