Indian IT companies get ready to log out from quake-hit Japan

Indian IT companies get ready to log out from quake-hit Japan

BANGALORE: Four days into Japan's biggest crisis since World War II, India's top tech firms have started bringing back employees and moving work to their centres outside Japan. On Friday last week, the country was h IT by an earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter Scale that unleashed a tsunami that swept parts of Japan.

The situation has been aggravated by the three nuclear reactor explosions the country has witnessed since then.

While accounting for a meagre 1% of India's total software exports worth $60 billion, Japan has been one of the most lucrative markets for outsourcing firms with top customers such as Toshiba , Sony and Nisaan opening up offshoring to cut costs and cope with scarcity of locally-trained IT staff.

Several Indian IT players have centres in Japan with the larger ones like Infosys and Wipro employing over 400 people in the country. Infosys said it was bringing back most of its employees to India and that even the Japanese nationals among them had been given an option of shifting to India for a while and working from here. Infosys has been talking to the Indian government for this. The company will continue to support clients locally and from offshore locations till the situation stabilises.

Wipro Technologies said it had offered its employees the option of sending their families home. "We are giving the option to families of employees to return to India and we will facilitate the same. Many of our customers are back in operation and we are using options like working from home and gearing up our offshore support to ensure business continuity," Saurabh Govil, Senior Vice-President, Human Resources, Wipro Technologies said in a statement.

Top IT firm Tata Consultancy Services , which has facilities in Yokohama, said it was receiving some requests from employees in Japan but mostly to send back families. "We are in close touch with our team in Japan around the clock. We are ready to relocate our Indian employees and their families back to India as well as move our local Japanese employees and their families to other locations of safety. We are also engaged with customers to see how they can be supported," TCS said in a statement.

Pune-based Zensar has close to 200 people working on Japanese projects. "The people who had gone for implementations have come back and eight Indians who are based in Tokyo have also been given the option to come back which they will probably exercise," said the company's vice-chairman and CEO, Ganesh Natarajan.

Others like Polaris were also bringing back the employees and distributing the work to Singapore and India. Companies also said they were waiting for their employees' homes to be tested for radiation levels following which they would decide if they needed to call them back. "Following the blasts at the nuclear reactors the authorities are studying radiation levels. Residences of our employees are yet to be studied but in case the radiation level is found to be above permissible levels our employees will be asked to leave immediately," Arup Dasgupta, managing director, Metalogic Systems told ET.

For years Indian tech firms have been attempting to break into Japan's lucrative market, but the country's conservative customers have always stayed away from large scale offshoring. In past few years, however, these companies managed to make some headway with Japan now contributing $700-800 million to the entire Indian IT market. "There will be some impact but Japan contributes only 1% to our overall revenues so this may not be very significant," V Balakrishnan, chief financial officer of Infosys Technologies said.