Will India realize importance of home-grown firms?
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 18 October 2010, 23:04 IST   |    38 Comments
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Will India realize importance of home-grown firms?
Bangalore: The 'Foreign Brand' tag seems to be enough to lure people in India not only for clothing, apparel or shoes rather for technology too. "Indian brands like Infosys, Wipro, TCS , Ranbaxy , Tetley, and Reliance have the potential to eclipse western giants in both size and global brand recognition within the next 10 years," said Ian Batey, the internationally revered marketing guru while addressing the delegates in Ad Asia conducted in 2003. Seven years down the line, despite several Indian companies gaining international recognition for proving a tough competition to foreign firms, the affinity towards the Western brands remains the same. The Digital Brand Index (DBI) for India which was revealed by Edelman, an independent public relations firm enlisted Google and Microsoft to be the most popular brands among the users engaged in conversations online. Followed by these two technology brands, Yahoo!, Intel and Sony complete the top five chart. Set aside the preference of the dominant population, when it comes to the government domain there's hardly a difference. For instance, Indian Railways preferred an expensive foreign technology called Train Protection Warning System (TPWS) from Europe over India's own patented Anti Collision Device (ACD) system. Despite recommended by industry experts about indigenously developed ACD's efficiency over TPWS, that too at a low cost, the government opted for spending more on a foreign technology. When it comes to government projects, Indian companies often shy away to go for it. Indigenous projects which are more promising in terms of yielding them recognition in the country, do not offer scope for higher growth. Stock markets value companies in terms of their growth and earnings potential. For a short term, the international market assures scalable growth for the companies. After the global economic downturn, domestic companies are balancing their focus towards the domestic market as they do not want to divert their business entirely towards the U.S. market. Though it has been witnessed over the years that MNCs are given more preference for government projects. For instance, IBM has marked its presence in India since 1992 and since then it has been facilitating the government in adopting newer technologies in its existing systems. Most of the experts often wonder and try to motivate Indian startups to initiate such a creation which would advance technology to a different level all together and would become a generic term for people like 'google'. Though there are several technology companies in India, which have a competitive edge over the strong and established brands but are still struggling as they find it difficult to position their technology beside the influential brands. Customers in India are mostly swayed by the brand name when it comes to technology or tech products. It is difficult to convince a customer to try some new product delivered by an Indian company. What is required at this point of time is the way the Indian technology is allowed to gain acceptance in the global market and for this Indians need to be ambassadors of the indigenous products and technology.

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