Business Week recently suggested that TCS (Tata Consulting Services) was somewhat a more American company than IBM. As per the author of the article, a comparison based on the percentage of sales in the USA for the last quarter shows that TCS generated 51% of its revenue in the USA, while IBM generated only 35%.

I have a couple of comments:

• First, percentages are OK, but they do not make much sense without the raw numbers. TCS’ total revenue for the year ending March 2008 was of $ 5.7 B, to be compared to over $ 36 B for IBM (services represented last year 37% of the overall $ 98.8 B revenue). Even if only 35% were generated in the USA, this is still more than twice as much as TCS’ entire worldwide revenue.

• And more importantly, I visited the “executive management” page on TCS’ WEB site. To me, the nationalities of the Executive Board members and corporate officers are an accurate indicator on how truly International a company is. All TCS executives are from India.

So, is TCS really more American than IBM?

Remi
www.outsourcing-vsc.com

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