“We have been in India since 1996 and you can count on us to stay invested in the country for at least the next 20 years,” says Olivier Piou, Chief Executive Officer of Gemalto, the €2.4-billion digital security company. Though 2013 was a challenging year for the Amsterdam headquartered-company’s India operations, Piou says that there were no lay offs in India. “We are in India for the long term and we know that we have to be patient,” says the 56-year-old Frenchman whose company develops software that is embedded in SIM cards, banking cards, tokens, electronic passports and ID cards.

In a telephonic chat with Business Line , Piou charts the future course of action for the Euronext-listed company . Excerpts:

The last few years have been challenging for several MNCs in India due to a host of factors. How was Gemalto’s performance during this period?

Yes, we did see a slowdown. We always knew that e-governance programmes would be time consuming as they are massive and tend to be ambitious. What impacted us the most was the depreciation of the Indian rupee which resulted in the same amount of rupee revenue translating into fewer euros. We tried to offset the impact but there is little you can do to nullify it completely. Yet, we did not reduce our staff strength in India last year as I believe that India has immense potential. In a bid to negate the slowdown, we increased sales of our services to other markets from India.

Which were these markets?

Our primary objective is to sell our solutions in India and countries such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Since we had excess capacity last year, we decided to use the opportunity and export to Indonesia, Thailand and South-East Asian countries.

What are your plans for the Indian market this fiscal? Will you be stepping up capacity?

We do not plan to significantly augment capacity. We had excess capacity last year because of the slowdown and we intend to utilise it going forward. We also work with Indian system integrators to maintain our IT and back office systems. That model will continue this year too.

Will Gemalto strengthen its top management team in India in order to cater to some of the emerging opportunities here?

This is something that we are discussing internally right now. The good thing is that opportunities in India are similar to what we encounter in other countries when it comes to government programmes, enterprise authentication and mobility led-financial services.

As CEO, it is imperative that I allocate the best resources to markets which have growth potential. Since we anticipate India and China to do well for us, the big question is whether we should put more of our top resources on to these markets to realise the opportunity. We will grow in India this year as we are upbeat about the prospects of the telecom sector.

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