March 15, 1999
|
|
|
|
SOFTWARE Cyber Czars Log in. Press enter. Sounds simple but that's how software pioneers have put India in the top league of the sunrise industry. By Sumit Mitra It was like searching for a needle in a haystack. After the February 27 budget, stockbrokers were driven crazy by buyers looking for software stocks none of which were on sale. The star scrips of the industry, already trading in four-figure prices, surged by more than Rs 100. Even small-cap software stocks like Rolta India and Silverline zoomed like rockets, hitting the 8 per cent ceiling on daily increase within minutes of trading. The big-ticket stocks followed soon. By March 3, when the markets opened after the Holi festival, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) had to repeatedly apply the circuit-breaker on most of the software stocks. Yet they had all scaled their new peaks. In three days' trading, Infosys Technologies reached Rs 3,376, up from Rs 2,680, and Wipro Industries, a diversified group with a software core, traded at Rs 3,990, up from Rs 3,405. Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) were also picking up the available lots of the other top-notch scrips like Pentafour Software, Satyam Computers, Mastek Limited and DSQ Software. If one had a share each of the eight companies named above, their total value would have been Rs 9,328 on February 27 morning. By March 3, it became Rs 11,388, a 22 per cent rise. Underneath this euphoria is a lot more than punter's instinct. As NASSCOM President Dewang Mehta says, "Software is the flavour of the decade, not this week." To make the flavour compelling, a clutch of "softwarriors" has built up its businesses since the 1991 liberalisation on a truly global scale. Riding out the country's perennial problems of costly credit, surly labour and poor infrastructure, these softwarriors created a pool of knowledge workers at a nominal capital cost, and have sold their software development and maintenance services to most of the Fortune 500 companies. The revenues of these software companies, earned mostly in dollars, have grown by over 50 per cent in each of the past five years and their exports are expected to grow by almost four times in the next two years. India Today takes a look at the cyber czars and the vast empires they've built in such a short time. -with Amarnath K. Menon and K.M. Thomas
|
|
Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions | Syndication BUSINESS TODAY | INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY © Living Media India Ltd |
 |
 |
