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TCS looks at forging alliances

Savio G Pinto

Tata Consultancy Services, the software arm of Tata Sons which recently set up a subsidiary in Shanghai, China, is planning to forge alliances with local Chinese companies.

According to Girija Pande, regional director, Asia-Pacific, TCS, "We plan to have local partners not only in the marketing area but also in certain domain verticals. The partnerships would factor in a mix of marketing as well as front-end representation."

"The tie-ups would initially be ones which would cater to the telecom and the banking sectors," he added.

"A sizable portion of our contracts with GE will be done out of China. In fact, the Chinese centre would be catering to a large Japanese customer base which would rather outsource work to China than India," Pande said.

The $100 million GE account is the largest ever received by an Indian company. TCS had unveiled its initiatives in China with the announcement of the launch of Tata Information Technology (Shanghai) Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Tata Sons, in Shanghai, a few weeks back.

Pande said TCS plans to recruit around 125 employees for the Chinese initiative over the next one year largely from the local population. This would be scaled up to around 250 employees in the following year.

"We were keen on the Chinese foray and had been working on the plan for the past one and a half year. We started looking at the region seriously after some of our multinational clients which also had operations in China asked us to undertake work for them over there," said Pande.

The China initiative consists of three parts with the main office headquartered in Shanghai, while an office in Beijing undertakes the marketing activities in addition to activities such as client relationship management, public relations and legal areas as well as providing support to the north-east and north-west regions.

In Hangzhou, TCS will set up a development centre which will provide end-to-end services for clients over the Asia Pacific region in co-ordination with TCS' delivery centres in India.

The Hangzhou development centre will add to TCS' network of global development centres located around the world including the US, Australia, Hungary, Uruguay and the UK.

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