Despite the rise of automation and the tightening of US immigration norms, the export of Indian software services has increased by 10.3% to US$97 billion, according to data released by the country’s central bank.
“Exports of computer services remained the dominant component, with private limited companies and public limited companies holding equal shares in exports during the year,” stated the Reserve Bank of India.
For the study, the bank claims to have collected data from 7,506 IT companies, which together account for 82% of the country’s software exports. The increase occurred in the fiscal year ending March 2017.
The United States and Canada have remained the top destinations for Indian software services exports, followed by Europe, in which the UK accounted for nearly half of the total exports.
“The US dollar was the principal invoicing currency, accounting for 73% of software exports, followed by the pound sterling and the euro,” the survey highlighted, adding that the off-site model remained the preferred method of delivery.
Faced with the prospect of becoming irrelevant in the changing technology marketplace, IT companies in the country are increasingly restructuring their business and harnessing new emerging technologies. This has resulted in layoffs and the retraining of thousands of engineers in new technologies, particularly data analytics, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI).
A recent report from NASSCOM, the country’s outsourcing lobby group, has predicted that over the next four years nearly 9% of the country’s 600 million workers would find themselves working in new kinds of jobs that do not exist today.
Supporting the report’s findings, South Korean mobile giant Samsung announced last week that it would hire as many as a 1,000 Indian IT professionals to develop solutions in machine learning, AI, internet of things (IoT), biometrics, natural language processing, and augmented reality.
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