More foreign firms head for India

The testimony to the fact that India is being chosen as preferred country becomes evident as many companies such as Patent Metrix, Cantor-Colburn and Schwegman, Lundberg, and Woessner & Kluth have already set up offices in India. Offshoring R&D in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology also has enormous potential for KPO. Pharma majors Astra Zeneca and GlaxoSmithKline have set up drug discovery centres at low-cost destinations to boost their research and development activities.

Even for R&D in software and chip design, major telecom and IT companies opt for India. Motorola, Intel, IBM, Cisco, Texas Instruments, Nokia and Philips have set up offshore design centres in India. The analysis of above data shall reveal that India becomes automatically a preferred choice of the outsourcing countries. India has a growing population of educated people capable of handling high-end knowledge-based work and research. With a huge talent pool, India could emerge as a global KPO hub as the sector requires specialized knowledge in respective verticals.

With the mushrooming of engineering and technical institutes in India, there will no shortage of skilled manpower in India. A Confederation of Indian Industry study states that India's transition from a BPO destination to a KPO destination is imminent. India also gets advantage in terms of cost advantage and more and more companies are turning to India for offshoring KPO work as quality work gets done at cheaper rates. For instance, drafting and filing of patent applications in the US is very expensive.

A typical application costs about $10,000 to $15,000 to draft and file with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Companies can save up to 50 per cent of the cost by offshoring the work to India. Offshoring R&D in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology also has enormous potential for KPO. Pharma majors Astra Zeneca and GlaxoSmithKline have set up drug discovery centres at low-cost destinations to boost their research and development activities. Even for R&D in software and chip design, major telecom and IT companies opt for India.