Parul
The domestic technology industry’s revenue is projected to grow 3.8 per cent to $254 billion this fiscal, industry body Nasscom said on Friday and highlighted creation of 60,000 more jobs during this period. The industry had clocked a revenue of $244.6 billion in the same period last year, according to Nasscom’s annual strategic review report. Excluding hardware, the revenue is expected to touch $199 billion, a growth of 3.3 per cent over FY23, a per the report. Domestic revenue is estimated to log 5.9 per cent growth at $54.4 billion from $51.4 billion in FY23. The projected 3.8 per cent growth is despite a 50 per cent slide in tech spending and 6 per cent decline in tech contracts in 2023 globally. This means the industry has added $9.3 billion incremental revenue in the fiscal, Nasscom said.
The Engineering Research & Development (ERD) sector alone contributed 48 per cent to the total export revenue addition in FY24, Nasscom said. The ERD sector, she said was expected to do well but looks better than expectation and it has overall been tremendously positive for India. “Going forward, this is going to be one sector that we should watch out for.” According to Nasscom, while there was a marginal growth in the deal pipeline, the big change was the change in the deal size, which spiked 70 per cent. She said while there was a lot of talk about job losses in the face of AI, the industry grew in terms of employment. Despite reports of massive retrenchments, the industry added net 60,000 jobs, taking the total headcount to 5.43 million in the year.
“We hired around 60,000 people in addition to over and above last year. (But) what we are seeing definitely there is a correction because there was also a lot of over hiring done during the Covid years. So we are seeing some level of correction happening which is expected and needed for the industry,” Ghosh stated. Nasscom said it is seeing the hiring moving towards jobs in AI, data, clouds, cyber security. “So the frontier technologies is where we are seeing the demand growing and the industry is putting a lot of efforts to ensure that we continue to upskill existing workforce,” she added. Globally, she said, nearly 65,000 employees are being trained on generative AI skills.
