Finally, does Infosys actively pursue projects with large Indian corporates?
In 1989, we took a decision to operate only in the packaged software area in India. However, over the past few years we did a re-think and have bid for pojects within India. But, I find that Indian IT companies, even the larger ones, compete so severely on price, that it makes it very tough. For instance, two years ago we bid when a big Indian media house wanted to implement leading-edge information systems. So did two of our competitors. One quoted a tenth of our bid and the other 30 percent of it. Because we wanted to do the project, we were willing to forego another 10 percent. Though the lowest bid was eliminated, the other IT company was willing to go 20 percent lower than their earlier quote. I don’t want to comment further on what happened. That’s the reason for our reticence to compete for projects in India. Fortunately, this is not the case with our banking product. Since organizations have evaluated it and get an immediate solution, they are willing to pay a decent sum for it
