Processing .....please wait.. 
The article has been forwarded.... 
Post recession, Japan comes calling to India
By siliconindia
|
Monday, 29 December 2008, 18:49 IST |
2 Comments
Chennai: Having basked in glory all these days for having produced candidates with that perfect American drawl, the recent economic recession seems to have taken its toll on linguistic analysts and specialists, with English accent trainers increasingly finding themselves out of their jobs by the day. The emergence of Japan as an alternative destination for IT outsourcing and allied services seems to have found favor with the Indian IT conglomerates as Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana symbols are replacing the Texan, Californian and British accents as the 'in-thing'.
Valued at $108 billion by Price Waterhouse Coopers, the Japanese IT market has India accounting for approximately 13 percent of the off shoring market. The BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) and the manufacturing sectors comprise around 42 percent of the total IT services. Chennai based Infoview technologies, an organization that is fully dependent on business from Japanese majors, is making sure that its employees know Japanese symbols by heart. 70 percent of its employees have learnt the language and its top-management has reached the 'near-native level' in terms of mastering the language. Having launched an online Japanese learning software for beginners in India, the company is targeting 10,000 learners in the first year.
Noida based Nucleus Software that generates half of its revenue in Japan, is also on a similar initiative encouraging its employees to learn the language and is employing the services of interpreters and translators to achieve the same.
Indian entrepreneurs feel that this will go a long way in cementing a long-term relationship with their Japanese clients, as they feel that the main challenge is the language. Once their expectations have been met, a fairly long-term relationship can be expected, feel many entrepreneurs who are vying to land a partnership-deal in the land of the rising sun.