THOMAS K. THOMAS
Aadhaar or KYC market is expected to grow by 70-80 per cent and that will spur our growth. - Partho Dasgupta, Managing Director of NEC India
Partho Dasgupta, the recently appointed Managing Director of NEC India, has his work cut out. He wants to grow revenues from India by 40 per cent in a slowing market and wants to create more visibility for the Japanese electronics giant. He tells Business Line on how he plans to achieve this.
NEC has kept a low profile in India so far. Do you plan to change that?
We started very small but now we are now exporting, we are exporting to APAC, to Russia. We have a factory in Chennai where we got about 100 people. There are not many Japanese companies who have a manufacturing base in India. We are also focusing on using the local talent, local R&D, local market, local reference architecture. At NEC, we drive the innovation in the areas that we are in, however, the moment that market gets commoditised, we move to the transformation pieces which give us the margins.
So is it a conscious strategy to be a niche player?
It is a conscious strategy to move to the transformation pieces where you add value. The difference between NEC and other players is that others look at India just as a trading point, while for us we also look at building global capabilities. We have just taken over a company called NHST; this was a joint venture with HCL it has got about 500 people focused on software development that again adds to our overall global delivery capability.
You mentioned localisation, could you give me an example of the same?
Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is an example. We just did business with PVR Cinemas they wanted to do a loyalty programme using NFC technology. Through this application, available on BlackBerry Z10 devices, customers can buy tickets along with refreshments. This is done through an app called PVRWallet and that app is powered by NEC NFC technology.
However, it is a very high end product and cannot be simply brought to the mass market. We have a big pipeline of national institutions who are interested in this technology and want to build loyalty programmes which are virtual in nature. It is completely transformational in nature and completely a blue ocean. We have a team dedicated to that.
With Aadhaar coming in, we are already market leaders in biometrics space. The whole idea is how to get into the next stage, which is face recognition and then subsequently DNA recognition.
What kind of growth targets have you set for yourself?
We grew our revenues by an average of 28 per cent till last year. This year, we plan to grow by 40 per cent. People have expressed scepticism about this figure but in our case growth is not linked to volume. Say Aadhaar or KYC market is expected to grow by 70-80 per cent and that will spur our growth. Telecom and retail sector are also areas of growth. We already have plans to take on board 200 people for our joint venture with HCL and that is huge since the base is only of about 500 people. We are not going to be hiring like TCS which hires in thousands but for us 250 is a big number.
(This article was published on August 6, 2013)
Keywords: Partho Dasgupta, NEC India, Japanese electronics giant, NFC technology, Aadhaar, KYC market