NTT’s India business crosses $500 mn milestone as IT service biz revives

Japan’s NTT Group, one of the top tier providers of technology and business solutions globally that is expected to close the current financial year with topline of around $86 billion, has quietly crossed a milestone from its two flagship businesses in India.
 
The unit providing data centre colocation services, cloud services and dedicated hosting or managed services to customers across India has been on a high paced growth track, nearly quadrupling its revenues over the last five years. But, its IT services unit had been facing headwinds. However, for FY24 the latter witnessed a revival, as per data collated by VCCEdge, a financial research platform.
 

 
NTT India Pvt Ltd, which houses the IT services business and has been shrinking for three straight years after the onset of the pandemic, grew for the first time in four years during FY24, rising 25%. Although it fell short of the previous peak, at ₹1,930 crore it came close to matching the previous peak at ₹2,100 crore.
 
Meanwhile, the data centre unit that has become the driver of the group in the country having overtaken the sister unit three years ago, continued to climb with 20% rise. Although the 30-40% growth rate of the previous two years has moderated sharply, the revenue profile remained strong during FY24.
 

 
Put together, the two key business units saw revenues rising 22% to ₹4,649 crore or over $550 million during FY24.
 
Four years ago, it had said it is merging three business entities under Sharad Sanghi, founder of Netmagic, a VC-backed data centre company it acquired a decade ago. The group roped in former IBM executive Avinash Joshi as CEO of its India business thereafter. Joshi was reporting to Sanghi, who remained the managing director of the operations. Sanghi was recently redesignated as chairman relinquishing his role as MD of the firm with Joshi becoming the lead for India.
 
Meanwhile, even as NTT globally announced a merger of the IT services business of NTT DATA and NTT outside Japan into a new operating company, as of March 31, 2024 it continued to operate multiple entities in India, regulatory filings show.

Also read: How NTT’s India business got upended with a new show stopper

NTT Global Data Centers & Cloud Infrastructure India Pvt Ltd (formerly Netmagic IT Services) which provides data centre colocation services, cloud services and dedicated hosting or managed services to customers across India, brought around 57% of total revenues and nearly two thirds of profits.
 
NTT did not comment on the business segments in India.
 
Last year in January, the company announced the setting up of a new data centre campus in Noida with a total planned capacity of 52.8 megawatt critical IT load. With this new campus, NTT GDC’s division expanded its India footprint to more than 268 MW with 18 data centres across Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru.
 
The Noida data center is part of $11 billion investment over five years (from 2022 to 2027) announced by NTT Ltd for expanding data center capacities in key markets, including India.