In the year 1998-99, the domestic peripherals industry stood at Rs. 13.60 billion as compared to Rs. 8.33 billion last year. It posted a stupendous growth rate of more than 63.27%. The trend of companies moving away from dot matrix printers became more pronounced in 1998-99, with almost 46% of printers sold comprising of inkjet and laser printers (non impact printers). In fact, even within non impact printers segment, inkjet printers emerged as a popular choice.

The training segment of the Indian IT industry had a good year, during 1998-99. It sold a potent mix of education and hope. As per industry estimates, this segment aggregated about Rs. 12.5 billion worth of revenue, and registered an impressive growth of over 32.7% over the last year’s revenues. With the number of computers installed going up, the gap between demand and supply of trained manpower is increasing steadily. The training segment is expected to continue to boom in the coming years. The growth areas would be accentuated by high end platform specific certifications oriented training, corporate and government users, and that for general PC use by SOHO users. This year, many of the leading institutes were in a consolidation phase. They are looking at emerging overseas markets which are almost nascent, and also have objective of emerging as amongst the world’s leading training service providers.

Networking has emerged as a major area of operation in the IT industry. During 1998-99, the segment netted Rs. 9.8 billion worth of revenue, a growth of almost 37.06% over the previous year’s Rs. 7.15 billion.

The next wave of domestic spending will be spearheaded by landmark recommendations of National IT Task Force and drive in the private sector to establish enterprise computing and electronic commerce systems. It is expected that in the year 1999-2000, the IT industry of India would further improve its performance and may gross revenues of Rs. 361 billion or US $ 8.39 billon, with software and services industry continuing to command more than 60% share in Indian IT industry’s revenues.