Wen to hop into city before Delhi

Wen to hop into city before Delhi
Chinese PM’s Visit Emphasises Growing Importance Of Tech Capital
The Times of India

Bangalore: It’s Beijing-2-Bangalore for the Chinese premier. The country’s tech capital is getting spruced up to receive Wen Jiabao on April 9.

As if to underline the growing importance of Bangalore, Wen is setting foot in Bangalore before New Delhi, the traditional first landing spot for visiting dignitaries. The Chinese premier is expected to visit defence establishments like HAL and ISRO, along with Huawei Technologies while in Bangalore. He will bring a jumbo delegation of 70, comprising diplomats, bureaucrats, ministers, industry experts and journalists.

The entire Chinese industry is expected to closely watch Wen’s visit to Bangalore, a destination they consider both as a “contender’’ and “complementary’’ for knowledge-based businesses. Chinese leaders seem to have a special love for the city. Setting it off was former premier Li Peng’s visit to the city in 2000, which was a milestone in the Beijing-Bangalore trade interactions. A couple of years down the line in 2002, it was the turn of then Prime Minister Zhu-Rongji, whose open invitation to Infosys to invest in China got entangled in redtape.

When former Indian Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee visited China in 2004, both countries decided to set up a Joint Study Group of economists and officials to review the existing trade relations, identify new areas and draw up a comprehensive perspective for further development. Industry observers believe that Wen and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh would refresh those initiatives now.

Being forerunners of the four key growth-centric countries along with Russia and Brazil, India and China attract a lot of attention in the international community. Their sheer size —over one-third of the world population lives here —and dominance in knowledge economy have been the disturbing factors for the rest of the world. Also, the Sino-Indian bilateral trade has touched $20 billion from $1.8 billion in 2001.

China already has a wide base of domestic IT services market, pegged at $4 billion, against India’s $2 billion. By 2008, China is expected to double it to $8 billion, while India would have reached only $4 billion. “Its domestic focus has certainly put China at a vantage position,’’ said Partha Iyengar, vice-president (research), Gartner India.

Over a dozen Indian IT companies, including TCS, Satyam, Zensar Technologies, Infosys and Wipro, have a presence in China, seeing it as a hotspot for telecom, finance and manufacturing verticals. But not many Chinese firms have ventured out into India, except the Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies, that employs over 800 people in Bangalore, of which 30 are Chinese.

Nasscom chief Kiran Karnik said, “China has a huge, untapped domestic market and Indian firms can cash in on that, leveraging local talent in chip design and telecom/datacom technologies.’’