India's technology giants are eyeing China's market and talent pool in a bid to bolster growth.

"China for us is a strategically important place," said B. Rama Raju, co-founder and chief executive officer of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, India's fourth-biggest software services exporter.

The Hyderabad-based company was one of India's earliest entrants into the Chinese market. In 2002, it opened a wholly owned development centre in Shanghai, and it now also has operations in Dalian and Guangzhou.

Currently Satyam employs 400 people in China, but it is planning on increasing this to 3,000 by 2008.

"We are still in the nascent stage in China," said Raju. " But we expect our business growth to outpace the overall growth of the company in the coming years, thanks to the nation's growing domestic demand."

Currently, 16 per cent of the company's total business comes from China, mostly from multinational companies it serves globally.

In 2005, Satyam announced a co-operation with Microsoft to develop a multibillion dollar "enterprise solutions" market for the Greater China region.

"China has evolved into the world's manufacturing centre in recent years, which means we need to be here to provide services for our global clients," said Raju.

"Meanwhile, we are one of the leaders in providing solutions for telecoms and manufacturing sectors, which has great market potential in China. "

A number of Indian outsourcing companies, including the country's largest outsourcer Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai, have set up operations in China to tap the local market for IT services and provide local services for their multinational clients.

The Indian giant TCS also said this July that it had formed a joint venture with three Chinese partners called TCS China.

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