Japan’s third biggest auto giant Nissan has invited $250 million outsourcing bid from companies like Wipro, TCS, IBM, and Mahindra Satyam, even as Japanese companies are increasingly looking at India for IT outsourcing.

Companies like Toyota and Sony are looking to reduce their operational costs by outsourcing IT and back office work to India. According to the experts, they are expected to spend $ 2 billion on outsourcing.

Japanese companies outsource IT contracts worth $ 8 billion to countries like India, China, Korea, and Vietnam every year. 

Last year, India’s share was about $1.5 billion, as Japanese companies preferred neighbouring countries like China, which bagged $ 5 billion worth of work. Indian companies have not been able to make significant developments with Japanese outsourcing, despite being a very lucrative market for IT. Many of the Japanese companies still prefer local companies. IBM Japan, Fujitsu, NEC, and Nihon Unisys are among the established customers in the country.

Indian companies were not keen on smaller contracts from Japanese companies until now. Kazumasa Kuboki, an expert said that Indian companies need to gain confidence of Japanese companies by accepting smaller contracts. However, this year, new Japanese companies could look at the Indian market. Sony has said that the company would make a saving of $2 billion on operational costs at the electronics unit.

Mr Kuboki has said that recession and dearth of IT engineers are amongst the main reasons for Japanese companies to increase outsourcing this year.