Mumbai: Saurine Doshi, 44, took over the reins of AT Kearney Ltd’s India operations in August. For some two years, the Indian unit, the country’s third largest management consulting firm, was led by John Kurtz, managing director, Southeast Asia, from Indonesia.
Growth curve: Saurine Doshi says consolidation among Indian companies will ensure that the size of companies will become larger and the kind of money being spent on hiring services will go up. Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint.
Doshi, an experienced AT Kearney hand from the US, was sent to India three years ago to set up two new verticals—communications and high technology, and consumer industries and retail.
Doshi says AT Kearney’s Indian operations are nearly sold out in terms of time slots, and is candid enough to add that the firm has on occasions walked away from “surprising” price points that the competition grabbed later. Edited excerpts from an interview:
How do you look back at your Indian stint of three years?
It’s been an exciting three years. It’s good to be a part of a marketplace which is growing as (rapidly as) India. During this period, we built our business across a variety of business verticals, including telecom, IT services, consumer and retail.
Can you talk to us about your firm’s strengths in specific areas?
Globally, we focus on two or three key industries. Consumer and retail, telecommunications and technology, process industries and energy sectors, and automotive and discreet manufacturing. So globally, 85-90% of our businesses come from those four verticals.
What we have done in India is to pretty much replicate that model. When I moved to India the biggest industry by far for AT Kearney was really the process and energy industry. But my own background has been in the consumer and retail space and telecom and energy.
The growth in the Indian market has been phenomenal in the past three or four years.
It coincided well. So now we have a robust positioning in these two sectors and I came here and set up a practice. One is consumer and retail practice and telecom and IT practice, and so we have really built those two practices in the last three or four years.
How do you see your industry growing?
Overall, we see the consulting industry growing at a healthy pace of 15-20% a year in India. It is probably a $250-300 million marketplace. It will evolve in the next four-five years.
Recently, Tata, through a subsidiary, tied up with German consulting firm Roland Berger. Do you think such moves by Indian companies will put independent firms like yours at a disadvantage?
What Tatas are doing is not new in the global market. Many of the large Fortune 500 companies have their own internal strategic groups. And it’s a good thing for companies to do internally and they should rely on external help only if they believe there’s certain amount of expertise or cross industry perspective that is on offer.
How’s the Indian market growing?