The beginning of this quarter has certainly brought smiles on everybody’s face, though nothing dramatic turnaround has happened in the overall market scenario. All of the global stock exchanges have started moving northward, giving a signal to the market that it is not buried in the deep. The market will gather steam sooner than later. Although the Finance Minister of India’s Pandora’s box (Union Budget 2009) did not bring happiness to the investors, afterwards the articulation of officials and that of FM has shown a silver lining that disinvestment is going to happen in various government entities and the government could garner a handful of money to prop the apparently weakening economy of the country.
Hardly had the industry pundits finished deciphering the fine prints of Budget 2009, the news from Goldman Sachs announcing its bumper net earnings of $3.44 billion perked up the market. Goldman Sachs is one of the large investors in oil & natural gas, infrastructure, merchant banking & finance, etc.
The market further looked jubilant with the news from Intel that the chip-maker giant has improved its sales by 12 per cent, touching $8 billion in Q2 from $7.2 billion from the immediately preceding quarter. This news definitely bolstered the IT market outlook as products from Intel go into virtually all the devices – starting from PCs to cell phones to electronics and electric products. There is every possibility that Intel will announce a new go-to-market strategy soon.
Although the PC market in India has gone down by 7 per cent (6.79 million units) in 2008-09, and global CPU market has dipped by 7.5 per cent, it is expected that it will recover from Q2 onwards. As per MAIT, Indian PC market will touch 7.3 million units in this financial year – a substantial gain over the previous year.
The biggest news is from the holistic growth of the market. Between January and June, global VC firms have invested nearly Rs.570 crore in India, out of which IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) companies accounted for 52%. In terms of value, VC investments in these firms are worth about $75 million. Among ITeS firms, online services companies attracted 57 per cent of the money.
So, the net result is that if the global market goes through resurgence, the Indian IT market is to gain maximum.
Sanjay Mahapatra
Editor
