Perhaps ’tis the silly season, perhaps ’twas the wine in Goa, perhaps ’twas the trance music over New Year’s — whatever it was, I had the urge to make predictions for 2002. The market will come back up, but IT services companies will not keep growth rates up without revenue fudging, and their stocks will thud down to earth. A few IT product companies will be stars. Services firms will buy product companies to add spice to sagging bottomlines. IT services and IT-enabled services like call centres will quickly go out of fashion. Coding-coolie shops and coder-hatcheries will reinvent themselves or wither away. US visas will become easier, but fewer people will want to go; more US-based desi techies will come back. Venture capitalists will be second-time unlucky after herd-like dotcom and IT-services investments, but venture capital will still flow into India in a more experienced third generation. Mobile airtime rates will fall, then stabilise, then rise after consolidation and cartel-like pricing. Operators will expand SMS-based functions and charge more for them. Ownership of mobile phones will still double. Long-distance rates will fall; tiny operators will offer international calls over the net at a fraction of VSNL’s price. The dominant applications will connect internet systems, mobile users, phones, consumers and offices together. Broadband will still be two years away, as always, though the first few high-speed net centres will appear. The price of computers will not drop much, but you will get much more for your Rs 30,000. Hybrid mobile-organiser gadgets will grow. Net usage across India will double again, Indian-language computing will come of age, and the PC base in the country will double again. If 2001 was a year of shakeout and survival, 2002 will be a year of consolidation, and 2003 the next true boom year — based on fundamentals, not hype.
