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Hyderabad records Rs 6.7 billion ITES exports in H1

Syed Amin Jafri in Hyderabad

Hyderabad has recorded ITES exports of Rs 6.7 billion (Rs 670 crore) during the first half of the current fiscal year 2002-03.

Announcing this in Hyderabad on Thursday evening, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said the ITES exports from Hyderabad have witnessed a quantum jump in the first half of the current fiscal year, compared to the corresponding period of the last fiscal.

The ITES exports in first half of this year have soared by a hefty 385 per cent, compared to Rs 1.38 billion (Rs 138 crore) exports clocked in the first half of the last fiscal.

Hyderabad, he pointed out, had registered a 323 per cent growth in the last fiscal year as a whole, with the ITES exports jumping from Rs 1.63 billion (Rs163 crore) in fiscal year 2000-01 to Rs 6.9 billion (Rs 690 crore) in 2001-02. Hyderabad's growth was 323 per cent as against the all-India average of 73 per cent, he added.

"Hyderabad is the real destination for ITES in the country," Naidu said and recalled the initiative taken by his government to launch AP FIRST (Agency for Promotion & Facilitation of Investments in Remote Services & Technology) to provide a single-point interface to ITES companies for all regulatory approvals and other facilities required for setting up operations in Hyderabad and other places in Andhra Pradesh.

The AP FIRST, launched in June this year, has been doing very well in attracting BPO and ITES companies to Hyderabad, he pointed out. "We want to create at least one million jobs in the IT and ITES sectors in the state by 2010. We would like the IT and ITES segments to contribute $10 billion to $14 billion to the state's gross domestic product by that year," he explained.

He said the Nasscom survey recently ranked Hyderabad as No.1 ITES destination among nine major cities in India. Kochi, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Pune were all ranked after Hyderabad.

BPO and ITES would play a pivotal role in the services sector in the years to come. There was tremendous cost pressure on the multinational corporations to offload their services to India.

With the deregulation of telecom sector and 60 per cent reduction in tariffs in the last two years, the telecom costs have come down considerably in India and this would be another reason why locating BPO and ITES operations in India would be advantageous for the global companies, he pointed out.

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