IT industry is expected to grow faster in 2013

The Indian IT business is expected to do little bit better in the coming financial year. The industry's prime body Nasscom forecasted on tuesday that software industry would grow between 12% and 14% to $87 billion in the next financial year ie 2013-14. 

The increase is about 2 percentage points more than what the IT industry is expected to achieve this year. Nasscom's updated growth estimate for this year is 10.2%, with aggregated exports growing to $75.8 billion. It had started the year with a forecast of 11-14%, but soon revised that in the middle of the year, saying it would be closer to the end of the forecast. The latest estimate falls even below that. 

More than expected numbers from Software companies in the December has signaled a positive signal from clients on technology expenditure. "I do believe that we have a bigger eye on client budgets in the coming twelve months than February last year(2012)," N Chandrasekaran" chairman of Nasscom, said, BY following the release of the organization planning Review 2013. 

The domestic IT business is expected to grow between 13-15% to Rs 1.20 lakh crore in the 2014 fiscal year. It is estimated at Rs 1.04 lakh crore for the ongoing fiscal, a growth of 14.1% over previous year. The IT industry's share of Gross domestic product is almost 8% and the sector's share to GDP as a %age has grown three-fold in the last ten years," Som Mittal, president of Nasscom, said that.

The sector did net hiring of 1.88 lakh people this fiscal and now provides direct employment to 3 million people. "The sector is one of the largest organized private sector employers in the country. It also adds 9.5 million jobs indirectly. About 30% of our workforce is women. We are constantly seeing the percentage of women recruits going up," Mittal added. 

Mittal said the industry is growing its non-linear footprint. "Today, India is far beyond cost. We have created a differentiator across various services. No one can match our scale and maturity. We have over 25 years of outsourcing experience. We have more than 5,000 companies, over 750 MNCs who work here, and about 580 offshore development centres in 75 countries