Sun Micro sees robust India revenue on tech spends
BANGALORE (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O) hopes to maintain the pace of doubling India revenue every three years, as technology spending by telecoms and financial services firms remain resilient, its India unit head said on Thursday.
The Santa Clara, California-based maker of computer servers, software and data storage devices has 1,400 staff in India, its fastest growing market globally.
"The growth of our customers is humungous," Bhaskar Pramanik, president of Sun Microsystems India, a fully owned subsidiary that was set up in 1998, told Reuters in an interview.
"As a market, it's something which will continue to grow in leaps and bounds. We haven't as yet seen the tip of the iceberg."
Pramanik declined to disclose details of India revenue or profits, citing company policy, but said the revenue had been doubling every three years.
"My belief is that we can continue to have that kind of growth even with the much larger base numbers which we have today," he said. "It's a huge market. There are lots of opportunities, the growth rates are just going to accelerate."
In its fiscal second quarter ended December 30, Sun had got 17 percent of its $3.62 billion global revenue from Asia-Pacific, which includes Japan, Korea, greater China, India, South Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
Sun, which competes with IBM (IBM.N), Dell (DELL.O) and Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N), ranked No.1 in unit shipments in Unix server market in Asia-Pacific excluding Japan in the first three quarters of 2007, according to research firm IDC.
In India, Sun sees strong business potential as banks and financial services, telecoms and government departments step up investments on technology to boost efficiency.
In January, Sun said it had been selected by privately run Catholic Syrian Bank to help centralize its operations.
Its other big clients include cigarette and consumer goods maker ITC (ITC.BO), engineering and construction firm Larsen and Toubro (LART.BO) and telecoms operator Tata Teleservices Ltd.
India was a source for talent and a big market, Pramanik said, adding Sun's largest engineering centre outside the United States was in India.
Firms like IBM, Accenture (ACN.N), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Sun are increasingly competing for outsourcing deals in the Indian market, as government departments, banks, retail, and small-and-mid-sized companies boost investments on technology.
The Indian IT services market is expected to reach $10.73 billion by 2011 at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 23.2 percent, according to research and advisory firm Gartner.
(Editing by Ranjit Gangadharan)
