Information technology industry body Nasscom is taking a delegation to Japan in the coming week to coincide with the Prime Minister’s visit to the country. The delegation will interact with the industry leaders of Japan and talk on business opportunities for IT companies in both the countries. In an exclusive interview with BusinessLine , R Chandrashekhar, President, Nasscom, shares more details. Edited excerpts:

What would be the broad highlights/ agenda for this trip?

Indian IT provides a great value proposition for Japanese companies to fuel their innovation at competitive price by leveraging Indian talent in their global sourcing model. However, penetrating the second biggest IT services market in the world continues to be a major challenge for the Indian IT companies. Given the challenging situation, Japan considers India as one of its preferred partners and is warming up for much greater partnership post free-trade agreement between two nations. To further address these challenges, Nasscom is organising a delegation visit to Japan. The agenda of the delegation is to create awareness among the local companies about India and the Indian IT capabilities, as well as identifying potential business opportunities for our members.

How many people/ companies is part of the delegation?

Delegation will consists of over two dozen executives of around 20 companies specialising in offering IT outsourcing, business process management, engineering research and development — some of whom are based in Japan and some are travelling from India to be part of this trip. Delegation has a good mix of big and small companies covering spectrum of services.

The Prime Minister is also visiting Japan around that time (August 30 to September 4) so do you think this visit would bring in positive responses?

Japan is an important geography for the Indian IT-BPM Industry, and Nasscom considers it as one of the next growth geographies. Economic and political relations between the countries have always remained warm.

And, with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s emphatic win, the focus is back on relations between these two large economies of Asia. Therefore, the PM’s proposed trip to Japan will help strengthen the bilateral ties between India and Japan. Being a pro-business administration, this visit will additionally provide the necessary push for enhancing business potential between the two nations and will give India an opportunity to establish right value proposition and build trust.

Nasscom hopes to leverage the political goodwill created by the PM’s visit into more business opportunities and considers this the right time for India to make a strong pitch to Japanese corporations to move beyond in-sourcing and adopt outsourcing and leverage more of Indian talent in their global sourcing model.

What are your expectations from the Japanese firms as well as their Government?

Japanese companies are looking for high quality, proven and low-cost sourcing destinations as well as newer markets, which is provided by the Indian service providers.

Some of the largest companies from Japan already recognise this and are warming up to leverage Indian IT by partnering with Indian companies in Japan or by making direct investments into India by setting their own global in-house centres (GICs) to fulfil their IT and globalisation needs. Governments of India and Japan are aware of this opportunity for a strategic partnership and are facilitating increasing number of joint declarations, delegation visits and other business events between the two countries.

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