ERP constitutes 65% of IT firm's revenue in the region
The UAE continues to be the leading market in the Middle East in terms of turnover as well as order bookings for HCL Technologies, one of the global faces of the Indian IT services industry, a senior official of the firm has said.
"Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been the main revenue sources, comprising as much as 85 per cent of our total revenue in the Middle East.
The UAE is largest market in the region in terms of the number of clients and in terms of turnover as of now. However, as we're a legal entity in Saudi Arabia, we're going to have more focus on the Saudi market now," Virendar Aggarwal, Executive Vice President and Regional Head (Asia, Australia, Middle East & Africa) HCL Technologies, told Emirates 24|7.
"Our investment in Qatar would also go up now, as we expect Qatar to be the next hot destination especially as the country is going to be hosting FIFA World Cup in 2022," he added.
The firm, part of HCL a $5 billion global technology and IT enterprise firm founded way back in 1976 in India specialises in product engineering, R&D, enterprise and custom applications, enterprise transformation services, infrastructure management, and BPO services.
In February, the firm had announced the opening of its regional headquarters for Middle East operations in Dubai and had set aside an investment of $250 million (Dh918m) to expand its business in the next five years across the Middle East.
However, his firm has no plan to slash its investments in the region because of the slowdown, Aggarwal said.
"The slowdown hasn't impacted us. On the contrary, our business has been growing very rapidly in the region, and we're close to doubling our revenue from this region this fiscal year, compared to last year," he added.
The firm has continued to hire people in the region.
"We've increased our employee base to around 450 people across the region with 215 in the UAE alone," he said.
Asked what are the sectors that are driving the IT firm's growth in the region, he said: "It's been a mixed bag. In the UAE, for instance, the big drivers of growth are energy utilities, oil and gas and the government sector mainly.
However, in case of Saudi Arabia, growth is being driven by a variety of sectors ranging from family firms to large industrial houses."
He said the IT market matrix is very different in the region compared to other parts of the world. As a result the product offering also differ in the regional market compared to its peers globally.
"This market in general has been more of a package-driven market than development oriented market. Here our big focus is on ERP (Enterprise resource planning) and the largest piece of business comes from Oracle applications followed by SAP applications," he said.
ERP constitutes about 65 per cent of our total revenue in the region, IT infrastructure services around 15 per cent and the rest is application development, maintenance, content management and other areas.
On the other hand, ERP contributes only about 25 to 26 per cent only of our gross revenue globally, he added.
A number of top ranked Indian IT services firms have based their regional operations in the UAE.
According to estimates, UAE's direct investments in India represent 2.4 per cent of India's total FDI (foreign direct investment) inflows while Indian investments account for 7 per cent of the FDI in the UAE.
© Emirates 24|7 2010
