Digital transformation globally is a tremendous opportunity for India, says expert

The new buzz word in India's growth story is services exports. While India's goods exports clocked just 7.5 percent growth in the April-February period, and actually declined 9 percent if you count only February. India's services exports have shot up 30 percent in the April-February period and a whopping 37 percent in February alone.

Professor Richard Baldwin, who has written a paper for the World Bank, points out that globally, goods trade peaked in 2008 and is falling; but global services trade as a percentage of world GDP has climbed from 12 percent in 2010 to 20 percent in 2020.

Another point to note is that India's services exports is not entirely a software story. In fact in April-December 2022 software exports grew by only 21 percent but business services exports grew by 38 percent.

Among the people who are contributing in a big way to these services exports are the big four - EY, Deloitte, KPMG and PwC.

Rajiv Memani, CEO of EY India, believes that digital transformation is a tremendous opportunity for India.

"Last two-three years have been very strong for software exports. Going forward, given what is happening in global economy, the growth may reduce slightly but there will be still strong growth. So the growth in services — whether it is software or BPO — will be higher than what is the economic growth. A lot of change is happening in terms of digital transformation and a lot of that is happening in countries like India. So this is a tremendous opportunity for India," Memani said.

Bala Chandran, Partner & Head of Managed Services at KPMG in India, told CNBC-TV18 that financial services, media and digital content space are seeing significant growth.

Chandran said, "In the whole non-software services area, health services and financial services is picking up a lot of pace in terms of growth. We are also seeing a lot of growth in the digital, media and content space."

Debasish Mishra, Chief Growth Officer at Deloitte India said that every fourth Deloitte employee on this earth is based out of India.

"Deloitte is the largest professional services firm and every fourth Deloitte employee on this earth is based out of India. So we are now more than 1,00,000 people based out of India. It is not only the software services, all kind of services are getting delivered out of India. We have accounting services, audit services, R&D etc,"Mishra said.