The domestic technology industry’s revenue is projected to grow 3.8 per cent to USD 254 billion this fiscal, industry body Nasscom said on Friday and highlighted creation of 60,000 more jobs during this period. The industry had clocked a revenue of USD 244.6 billion in the same period last year, according to Nasscom’s annual strategic review report.

Excluding hardware, the revenue is expected to touch USD 199 billion, a growth of 3.3 per cent over FY23, as per the report.

Domestic revenue is estimated to log 5.9 per cent growth at USD 54.4 billion from USD 51.4 billion in FY23.

The projected 3.8 per cent growth is despite a 50 per cent slide in tech spending and 6 per cent decline in tech contracts in 2023 globally.

This means the industry has added USD 9.3 billion incremental revenue in the fiscal, Nasscom said.

“It was a growth year despite all the headwinds, the surprise here was that while export slowed down a bit we definitely saw a significant increase into domestic market including the business for tech services. I think it was the fastest growth we have seen in domestic market,” Nasscom President Debjani Ghosh said at a virtual press briefing. The growth in the domestic revenue was primarily driven by government and enterprise spending. She said that some of the tailwinds that stood out for the industry last year was the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), adding that India continues to be the preferred hub for GCC countries and this is getting even stronger.

“As we see companies, as we see the GCC scope of work moving from just back and work to more of R&D and more of innovation, this is where the India attraction goes up significantly, primarily driven by talent and political stability and ease of doing business,” Ghosh added.

The Engineering Research & Development (ERD) sector alone contributed 48 per cent to the total export revenue addition in FY24, Nasscom said.

The ERD sector, she said was expected to do well but looks better than expectation and it has overall been tremendously positive for India.

“Going forward, this is going to be one sector that we should watch out for.”

According to Nasscom, while there was a marginal growth in the deal pipeline, the big change was the change in the deal size, which spiked 70 per cent.

She said while there was a lot of talk about job losses in the face of AI, the industry grew in terms of employment.

Despite reports of massive retrenchments, the industry added net 60,000 jobs, taking the total headcount to 5.43 million in the year.

“We hired around 60,000 people in addition to over and above last year. (But) what we are seeing definitely there is a correction because there was also a lot of over hiring done during the Covid years. So we are seeing some level of correction happening which is expected and needed for the industry,” Ghosh stated.

Nasscom said it is seeing the hiring moving towards jobs in AI, data, clouds, cyber security.

“So the frontier technologies is where we are seeing the demand growing and the industry is putting a lot of efforts to ensure that we continue to upskill existing workforce,” she added.

Globally, she said, nearly 6,50,000 employees are being trained on generative AI skills.

(You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)