From Business Week
In southern Asia, you have India. Its projected annual growth in IT spending is 25%, demonstrating its immense desire to catch up to the West. Its multinational IT firms, such as Infosys and Wipro, are already competing on a roughly equal level with their Western counterparts, such as IBM. On top of this, it has massive quantities of graduates in the computer science and electrical engineering fields, increasing the level of technological knowhow by leaps and bounds every year.
To the north and east, you have China. It has a projected annual growth in IT spending of 6.5%, a far cry from India, but substantial nonetheless. More importantly, it has thousands upon thousands of low wage workers prepared to enter the industry. These facts, coupled with China’s large number of computer science and electrical engineering graduates and the influx of knowledge from outsourced jobs, such a Microsoft’s research complex, paint a picture of a very competitive Chinese IT industry in the future.
Put them together and you have bad news for IT in the West. Between Indian knowhow and Chinese labor, you have the possibility of extremely cheap and extremely effective IT companies. Fortunately, we haven’t reached that point yet, but the increasingly large amount of India-China conferences, collaborative efforts, and trade – notably investment and services – point in that direction. Something to watch for…
September 17, 2007 at 8:03 pm
[...] to deal with lack of infrastructure, lack of local talent, and government bureaucracy. As noted in another post, India is overcoming the first two problems and overcoming them at an astounding rate. The third [...]