BANGALORE: Infosys Chief Mentor N R Narayana Murthy said on Monday that though India was 20 years ahead of China in the Information Technology (IT) sector, Beijing was fast catching up with India in the sector by focussing more on education.
Addressing the induction ceremony of the company's InStep Programme in which over 125 candidates were selected among the 12,000 global aspirants here, Murthy said China was growing well in the IT sector giving better focus on education programmes which were fit for other other nations to emulate.
Though China had done extremely well in the manufacturing sector and created over 130 to 140 million jobs, it lagged India in software sector. However, China had extraordinary quality to overcome the gap and surge ahead in this sector also, Murthy replied to an internee from Beijing.
About Infosys's footprints in China, he said it had two of its development centres in the Middle Kingdom catering to the country's domestic and company's overseas customers. ''Infosys sees China as an extremely important market which is growing fast,'' he said.
India was able to gain edge over China in IT sector because of its large number of middle-level professionals and if India had to retain its present position, it had to maintain quality and develop fairly advanced systems with 24/7 work culture to serve the globalised world.
Murthy said his company had many challenges to face including retaining its present position keeping pace with the speed of globalisation. ''World is becoming more and more competitive and more and more corporations are getting into our business. To remain ahead of others, the company has to improve its productivity with reduced cost and make more and more profit while enhancing its brand equity at the global level," he said.
On the Infosys' internship programme Murthy said it was being conducted to demonstrate India's and company's strength in IT sector to the world. The programme would also help Infosys employees to interact with people of multi-culture and get international exposure.
The programme was designed to gain mindshare with students drawn from top colleges in the world as they could be the company's future clients, employees, competitors or even leaders of tomorrow.
