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At the Nasscom's CEO forum held in Pune, for which global head honchos Victor Tsau, co-founder and senior vice-president, Linksys, a division of Cisco, Jawad Ansari, general partner, Miven Venture Fund and Rohit Agarwal, founder and CEO, TechTribe Networks were present, the high interest in China and India was evident.
Ansari said that more and more US venture capitalists are taking interest in India. With the exposure to venture capital funds with assets under management of over $24 billion, Ansari spoke of his fund for the consumer market especially those on the mobility side for media and entertainment.
"There are 100 million mobile phones in India and 400 million in China. Companies working on Internet Protocol (IP) TV, mobile TV and application like storage, amortisation and content targeted at the mobile phone have huge growth potential and we are looking at them," said Ansari while speaking about the great synergy China and India present to tap into each others markets.
"We are interested in developing a triangle of the US, China and India as against the current India-US and China-US only markets," said Ansari.
Presenting the growth story of Linksys from a garage to a billion dollar entity, Tsau noted that Indian and Chinese companies have still to find a mention in the list of top 100 brands globally.
"It is important to build a brand and a channel network to drive sales," he said while sharing that 80 per cent of its sales come from retail consumer channels.
The firm with 75 per cent of sales from North America and 20 per cent from Europe is looking at tapping market potential in China and India.
"By 2010 we will have revenues of $3-5 billion and the US will constitute to 50 per cent our revenues as against the current 75 per cent," said Tsau while sharing that the company is in the process developing a local strategy to tap into the China and India markets.
It is not only the established companies and VCs that are interested at the potential of the domestic market but start-ups too are of the same view by Agarwal.
A founding member of Webify Solutions that recently was acquired by IBM and also associated with other successful start-ups, he shared that his upcoming venture is solely focused on the Indian market.
Kiran Karnik, president, Nasscom, spoke of the great potential that Pune, along with Chennai and Bangalore presented for attracting a major portion of the ofshores engineering services business.
"By 2020 ofshored engineering services will be a $50 billion industry and Pune, Chennai and Bangalore have been identified as potential hubs," he said on the basis of the recent report released in association with Booz Allen Hamilton on the engineering services market.
