Monday, November 26, 2007

India hits second spot on entrepreneur rankings

More Indians have been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug than before. About 82 Indian companies made it to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia-Pacific companies this year, compared with 48 last year.

India tied with South Korea for the second spot for the number of entrepreneurs, according to Steven Dow, programme director, Deloitte Asia-Pacific Regional Office.

At the number one spot is Taiwan, which had 99 companies in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia-Pacific list. Compared to India, China trails behind with only 53 companies, while Japan and Australia have 63 and 62 companies, respectively in the list.

The companies that made it to Technology Fast 50 of India have recorded an average three-year revenue growth of 489%. The top five companies have a collective average three-year revenue growth of 1,637%. The fastest growing company in this list was RateGain IT Solutions, a firm providing technology solutions to travel and hospitality industries.

The Technology Fast 50 list was dominated by software companies (52%) followed by communications and networking companies (12%). The rest were internet communications, biotech and pharma firms.

According to a majority of the winners, the factor that contributed most to their growth was entering new markets and expanding their customer base. The biggest operational challenge in maintaining this rapid growth was expectedly, finding, hiring and retaining qualified employees.

For India, more than for Asia Pacific and EMEA, the initial funding was mostly through own efforts and resources rather than through venture capital, angel investors or private equity.

But more interestingly, a larger percentage difference was in how companies protected their intellectual property. In India, compared to Asia Pacific and EMEA, more companies protected their IP by training their employees to reduce IP theft as opposed to hiring third party specialists to advise on IP protection.

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