PwC sees revenues from India doubling by 2011

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the largest professional services companies in the world, expects India revenues to double in the next four years on the back of multinational companies (MNCs) setting up shop in India as well as Indian companies looking at expanding overseas.

According to Willem L J Brocker, partner, senior global advisor of PwC, at present Indian clients contributed 40 per cent to the overall revenues earned by its advisory services while non-advisory revenues from Indian and overseas billing was split around 50:50.

"With more and more MNCs coming to India and many more Indian companies expanding footprint overseas, India's share in PwC's overall revenues is going to double over the next two years," Brocker said.

Doubling of revenues would also mean an increase in PwC's manpower strength in India.

PwC at present has 2,000 employees in its advisory practice in India and could double the number over the next four years, said Ashwani Puri of PwC advisory services.

PwC's overall manpower strength in India is around 4,500 right now and this could nearly double in the same period.

Although PwC, at present, has an attrition rate of close to 12 per cent, it has identified "caring for employees and offering flexibility to allow people to make choices" as a tool to control it, said Brocker.

PwC has also identified secondment as a tool to assure client service quality despite rapid growth.

"At present we have about 15 very senior level secondments and many more at the lower levels while six years ago, the figure was zero," said Brocker.

Secondment, or temporary transfer of an employee to another department within an organisation or movement of an employee to another organisation, is increasingly being recognised as valuable for development at PwC.

As organisations adopted ever flatter management structures, opportunities for promotion through a succession of line management positions were limited.

Secondment offered employees career development opportunities and was increasingly being used as part of talent management programmes and to develop skills base.

At present, PwC's technology advisory services offered services from strategy through implementation for clients across the world, ranging from IT strategy and services, focusing on IT architecture, IT software review and IT quality and process advisory, IT governance and ROI, to complex systems integration in areas of service oriented architecture, portals, business intelligence and analytics, ERP advisory, SCM advisory (specialization on RFID), telecom advisory and tactical development.