Better late than never, India's Tata Consultancy Services has plunged into China's fledgling IT outsourcing market.
After a delay of several months, its Chinese JV is now operational and the company talks bullishly about China becoming the second most important supply of IT workers behind its home country India.
N. Chandrasekaran, TCS global head of sales and operations, told the Financial Times: "If any country has the potential to scale up like India, it's China."
He says China is the only other emerging market whose universities and colleges are producing enough engineering graduates to support large-scale outsourcing operations of the size of those in Inida.
Tata Consultancy Services (China) , is located in Beijing's Zhongguancun Software Park (z-Park), and was supposed to start operation in September this year , according to the official announcement of the JV.
But the negotiations for the JV did not conclude until November and took more than a year to complete.
The challenge now for TCS is to recruit and retain good staff in a country where costs are higher, the language is less familiar and staff attrition is high.
Chandrasekaran said the first customers of TCS (China) will be multinationals operating in the PRC, followed by domestic Chinese companies. Eventually, its China operations would also serve global markets.
TCS has the majority stake in the JV while Microsoft is also a strategic investor. The local partners are Beijing Zhongguancun Software Park Development, Chinese IT firm Uniware, and government agency Tianjin Huayuan Software Construction & Development.
Rival Indian outsourcers Satyam and Wipro are also looking to grow their Chinese operations significantly in the next couple of years. See this EngagingChina story for more
