NIIT to double S'pore business

Top Indian IT company also plans to double its staff and consolidate its Asia Pacific operations here,reports AMIT ROY CHOUDHURY

Business Times, www.itasia1.com.sg
25 Feb 2005

NIIT, one of India's top information technology (IT) companies, plans to double the amount of business it does from Singapore over the next 18 months and will also consolidate its Asia Pacific operations here.

NIIT chairman Rajendra Pawar said the company is holding discussions with various government bodies here as it moves to beef up its presence in Singapore. 'At the country level, Singapore is the fastest growing market for us worldwide . . . We are putting a lot of priority on this region,' Mr Pawar told BizIT in a recent interview.

The company - which counts major companies like British Airways, Channel 4, ING Group, Office Depot, SEI Investments, Singapore Airlines and Toyota Motors among its customers - also plans to double its current head count of 110 people within this 18-month period.

NIIT Technologies, on the other hand, is a more than US$100 million IT solutions company which is assessed at Level 5 of SEI-CMMi, the global standard for software development processes developed by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. It has operations in 14 countries and offers services in application development and maintenance, enterprise integration and business process management to organisations in the financial services, transportation, government and retail sectors.

NIIT Asia Pacific Pte Ltd was set up in Singapore in the mid 1990s, according to Mr Pawar. With the spin-off of NIIT's IT solutions business into a separate company, NIIT Technologies, from April 1 last year, the name of the local company was changed to NIIT Technologies Pte Ltd. Its published revenue for the 18-month period ended March 31, 2004 was S$24 million, he added.

Apart from Singapore, NIIT Technologies has offices in Australia, Hong Kong and Thailand. It is in the process of expanding to other countries in the region.

'NIIT Technologies is consolidating its Asia Pacific operations in Singapore and will leverage its more than a decade-long experience of working with demanding customers from Singapore and the Asia Pacific region to get more business,' Mr Pawar said.

According to the NIIT chairman, his company is moving into Singapore in a big way now to take advantage of the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA), the free trade pact that is expected to be signed by Singapore and India any time now.

'In qualitative terms, we're looking to have the highest growth across regions coming from Singapore because we want to take advantage of the CECA which the two countries are about to sign', Mr Pawar said.

He said NIIT has been doing a lot of software development work here and has acquired a 'critical mass of experience', adding: 'Over the last year, we have been having a lot of discussions with the government so that we can play an even more significant role in Singapore.'

Mr Pawar revealed that the education arm of the company, NIIT Ltd, although one of Asia's biggest such organisations, had up to now not entered Singapore because of the presence of a strong local player, Informatics. 'We thought we would be coming into a saturated market because there was a dominant player here,' Mr Pawar said. However, NIIT would wait and watch the market for a couple of quarters before reviewing this decision, he said.

Mr Pawar said the whole training industry went through a very turbulent phase worldwide post-2001. 'Even the world's No 1 player, New Horizons, has had to struggle . . . We faced a difficult couple of quarters but we have bucked the trend and gone back to growth,' Mr Pawar said.

He added that NIIT Ltd has worked with a number of educational institutes in Singapore to develop and deploy e-learning solutions.

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