BIMA Blog

I’ve been lucky enough to have been selected by the British Council to do a market visit to India as part of their Young Interactive Entrepreneur project. We arrived in India on Thursday last week and over the last few days I’ve been travelling around Mumbai with the group visiting a series of Indian organisations that are based in Mumbai talking to them and learning about their businesses in order to access the market and the collaborative opportunities for Indian and British businesses. We flew out of Mumbai early this morning and are now in our second location of the tour – Bangalore so I thought I’d take this opportunity to post my thoughts thus far.

As well as my thoughts below which focus on the overall business considerations it might be useful to read some of my other reports on from the trip which discuss the places we’ve been and people we’ve met, I think it might help to understand the business scene if you understand the place a little. You can find these reports on the Kempt blog tagged UKYIE.

Overview
India has a thriving Interactive industry with companies operating in almost every sphere you can think of, thus far on this trip we’ve met with companies that operate in mobile: both games and marketing solutions, Flash games, Advergames, core games: both full-scale development of AAA titles and services such as content development and download games however there are also lots of web companies and people working in other fields who I hope to meet later in the trip. As well as the obvious opportunity for outsourcing India has a massive local market which allows a lot of these companies to operate profitably without relying solely on outsourced work from overseas and perhaps most interestingly, due to some of the specific economic conditions over here some of the companies have come up with very neat solutions to their specific local challenges which potentially give them a global advantage, for example this morning we met with Narasimha Suresh, the founder of a mobile marketing technology services company called Telibrahma who’s doing some amazing work with Bluetooth distributed content which (whilst I’m not an expert) is just as impressive, if not more so, as anything that I’ve seen from the UK in this space.

Opportunities and Considerations for Business in India
Right now, the most obvious of opportunities for British companies, at least one like mine, over here is in outsourcing. Indians are very hard-working and keen to do business and this, combined with the significantly lower cost of living out here means that you should be able to source work at approximately a third of the cost of getting work done in the UK. However, I think it’s important to stress that this is not necessarily an easy option and there are various challenges that should be considered by UK companies looking to outsource, or in fact do any kind of business over here:

• Many Indians are not heavily exposed to western culture therefore they haven’t developed the same aesthetic sensibilities and don’t understand cultural references in the same way.
• Indians love to haggle and do business therefore I suspect that there’s a tendency for them to over-sell which might lead to a compromise in the quality of your project or lead to delays.
• One of the major considerations is, in my opinion, standards of employee welfare in a number of key areas:
  •  Training – does the business concerned invest adequately in their staff in order to ensure that they’re capable of doing the job they’re expected to do?
  • Working Conditions – are the facilities and equipment provided to the employees adequate and of a standard that you’re comfortable with? Particularly, do they have enough space to work in? Although all the companies that we’ve visited have been good and reputable there are lots of dodgy fly-by night outfits in India and even In the companies we’ve visited these conditions have varied from brilliant to slightly below a standard that I would be fully comfortable with.
  • Equal Opportunities, in a country where gender screening before birth is banned because of the danger of gender selective abortion equal opportunities is a consideration. It’s an unfortunate fact that the interactive industries are currently a heavily male-dominated field both here and in the UK therefore it’s likely that any company you outsource to will mainly employ men however I think it’s definitely worth checking that the companies concerned treat their male and female employees equally.

Recommendations
In order to counter some of the challenges above I’d recommend the following:

• If you’re going to embark on a project with a company over here you’ll probably need to factor in additional time and milestones for design approval in order to ensure a quality result. Alternatively you may wish to consider putting some resource from your own organisation out here in order to train and oversee the project, Indians are keen to learn and I suspect this would be immensely well received.
• Take some responsibility for making sure that the agreed budget is fair to all and the project is feasible within it, additionally you may want to try and factor in some kind of penalty for under-performance.
• Above all, before you outsource to a company over here ensure that you make a visit to them at their offices and check things out for yourself. Many Indians are naturally gifted salespeople so don’t take what they tell you at face value, it’s not that they’ll lie to you as such but they may well exaggerate!

So, to summarise, India is in my opinion a very exciting and rewarding place to do business, the pioneering spirit and optimism of its entrepreneurs is highly appealing and infectious. If you’re looking to outsource then large cost savings can be made however don’t be completely taken in by the 1/3 price tag and take the considerations above into account. Visiting now and again to check on progress is definitely not going to be a hardship. Due to the low cost of living here visits can be done very economically and, if you choose to stay in the best hotels the level of service you’ll receive is beyond anything that I’ve encountered elsewhere in the world. So… go for it! Check out India!