May 18, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan Mobile firms outstrip European counterparts NEW DELHI - Indian mobile phone companies have overtaken their European counterparts in the areas of development, pricing and marketing, although they are still lagging far behind in terms of network management, infrastructure and billing operations, United States-based consultant firm Arthur Andersen says. According to a benchmark comparison exercise carried out by the international consultancy firm, while Indian cellular companies have attained a maturity level of 2.8 reflecting regular communication and involvement for development and pricing of products (tariffs), European cell firms are still hovering at 1.7 with no formal involvement. "On a maturity scale of one to five, where one stands for initial and five for optimized maturity level, Indian companies have achieved a level of 2.6 for marketing of products, beating European firms which have scored 2.5," Sanjay Mehta, partner, Arthur Andersen says. The benchmarking pointed out that the higher maturity level of Indian companies in terms of development, pricing and marketing of products, was a result of limited competition in the market, unlike in Europe which operated under unlimited competition. However, European firms have bettered the Indian companies in all other parameters of judging process maturity level, Andersen said, adding that the latter would need to beef up its customer care operations, and strengthen its billing activities to meet global standards. Meanwhile, the Indian IT industry will not only emerge from the current slowdown but will witness a bigger surge in demand from the world over within this year, according to Rajendra Pawar, chairman of the leading software and IT training company, NIIT Limited. "We are going through a cleaning up process and we are going to see a bigger surge in demand for Indian companies when the revival comes through," Pawar said. Conceding that the robust growth of the US$7.44 billion Indian IT industry has suffered a setback in recent times, Pawar said the reason was that years of solid growth created a very strong impression and too much money started chasing IT. This is a "correction" after a very long period of hyper-growth, but, "this may take another six months or a little longer" and after that better times awaits Indian IT companies and there is no to downgrade the future growth projections, the chief of the New Delhi-based company said. To a question whether it would be realistic to stick to last year's projections that the Indian IT industry would be worth $87 billion by the year 2008, a confident Pawar said there was no reason to alter it. "We had projections of 40 to 50 percent growth, based on which we are looking at a certain relative size in 2008. My own feeling is that we would not be much lower than these figures, once revival happens," the NIIT chief said. (Asia Pulse)

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