India’s growth momentum may have been pulled back momentarily by the pandemic, but we firmly believe that the resilience and ingenuity of our people and business community will help us emerge far stronger, together. Morgan Stanley expects the country’s GDP growth to average 7% in FY23-26, and we, at SAP, will be an integral part of this rising India story, an India on the ascendant. As SAP celebrates its 25th anniversary, a look back at our journey reflects how intertwined we are, as a company, in India’s nation building efforts.
Almost 60% of India’s GDP, today, touches an SAP system. Our customers represent 55% of the country’s power generation capacity, and 8 out of every 10 cars driven on Indian roads is manufactured by an SAP customer.
We’ve been strategic partners to India’s digital transformation agenda towards building a robust nation:
- The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) deployed SAP’s ERP to enable data integration across NHAI departments into a single computer system. Today, SAP helps NHAI efficiently develop, maintain and manage over 90,000 km of highways.
- The Indian Navy adapted SAP solutions to manage their Financial Information System
- SAP helped replace Indian Railways’ antiquated paper-based system with a centrally administered, automated ticketing system. With SAP’s ticketing system, Indian Railways issues 20 million tickets daily and runs several city metro corporations efficiently.
- Airports Authority of India implemented SAP’s ERP to modernize its management of 137 airports, 160 million passengers, and 900 metric tons of cargo annually.
We have always been at the forefront in advancing digital inclusion and equity across the country. Through our flagship program, Code Unnati, we are propelling India’s inclusive growth, through digital training for over 400,000 children and youth. We have enabled over 1.8 million adolescents and children so far. Programs like Code Unnati and TechSaksham exemplify SAP’s purpose: to help the world run better and improve people’s lives
India is one of SAP’s key markets and also our second largest R&D center outside of our headquarters in Germany. As a recognition for our efforts and stupendous growth, SAP India received the Market Unit of the Quarter three times in a row in 2021. It’s a hattrick!
Where Next for SAP, and transformation at scale in the India story
The disruption caused by the pandemic has highlighted the importance of digitalization. Digital transformation is at the core of business resilience. RISE with SAP, a business transformation-as-a-service offering, is a step in this direction. We also launched a Rs 500 crore initiative to help our customers’ cloud transformation. Both these initiatives are also critical for the MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises) segment, which are the backbone of India’s economy, and a focus area for the government’s ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ (self-reliant India) program.
For SAP, the mid-sized enterprise segment is a key pillar of our India strategy. Nearly 80% of SAP India customers are SMEs. We believe SAP can contribute meaningfully to making these businesses globally competitive. And it is for this reason that we were excited to launch SAP’s Global Bharat program. We believe it will enable SMEs to become future-ready while driving greater efficiencies through access to the global marketplace, digitally skilling the workforce, and digitally transforming businesses. Towards that, this year we continued building on this to launch the 3rd season of Dare2Dream Awards to recognize business leaders and Mentors of Global Bharat to guide young entrepreneurs who nurture global ambitions.
We intend to advance this vision by leveraging an agile and scalable cloud technology that is co-developed in India and made available in local data centers, to help Indian enterprises recalibrate their businesses to run better. Some of our latest programs are specifically targeted at the startup ecosystem, and we are quite excited about India’s role in the startup space. Whether it’s Startup Joint Go-To-Market program, which help startups productize and take their idea to market, or Project Nakshatra. We are particularly excited about Project Nakshatra, for hyper-growth startups with digital product offerings to help them grow, build products at scale, and go global. This initiative will speed up the growth journey of innovators and future unicorns using a strong digital core. SAP India is keen to partner startups and unicorns and ride the wave of innovation Indian startups are showcasing to the world.
Interestingly, our conversations with customers are going beyond being competitive to being sustainable. Their goal has moved beyond efficiencies to entering the circular economy with new business models that ensures zero waste and tackles global climate challenges we are facing right now. In fact, during our global Sustainability Summit in April we launched research findings that showed 80 per cent of companies see a positive relationship between their company’s long-term profitability and environmental sustainability.
The fervor in India’s economic activity has inadvertently cast dark shadows on its environmental health – we are the third largest CO2 emitting country. In the last decade alone, India has accrued losses amounting to over $80B because of climate change disasters. So, under the Climate 21 initiative, we’re spear heading responsible planning and orchestrating the next phase of growth.
- By embedding sustainability in one’s business culture, although not as a P&L cost, rather as a significant business value creator to gain a competitive edge for the future.
- Ensure sustainability criteria into one’s decision-making to reduce your environmental footprint and enhance your reputation.
- Start measuring by process digitization and analytics to identify the outliers that need a realignment with your goals.
- Automate ESG reporting for both internal and regulatory purposes to build benchmarks and track your performance against goals.
Of course, we couldn’t have reached any of these milestones or achieved what we have without our employees! Today, SAP India has over 13,000 employees and growing. People are the heart of what we do, just as our customers are the focus of everything we do. By empowering our workforce, we are enabling them to bring the best to our customers. Recently, SAP was recognized among World’s Best Workplaces in
2021. We are looking forward to the next 25 years of our journey and what we can do for India as it takes off to firmly entrench itself as the world’s leading economy!
