IBM accelerates investments in China, Mexico, India

29 July 2008

IBM has strengthened its emerging market presence with the opening of three centres of excellence located in China, Mexico and India providing back office processing for its customers in banking, retail and service management arenas.

IBM has been accelerating its focus on the high economic growth potential emerging markets, which acounted for 18 per cent of its geographic revenue in the second quarter of 2008, and together grew 21 per cent.

IBM's business from the Brazil, Russia, India and China subset grew 31 per cent in the second quarter, led by "explosive growth in India".

"These results demonstrate that IBM has the ability to thrive in emerging markets," said Bruno Di Leo, IBM general manager, growth markets. "Our continued investments give IBM a competitive edge; global reach and scale; and services and products that deliver genuine value to clients wherever they do business."

Shanghai banking centre of excellence
IBM will establish a branch of its worldwide banking centre of excellence in Shanghai to support China's banking clients and to address their issues in core banking systems and payments. The banking centre will bring together world-class business and technology experts to design and implement next generation payment and core banking systems for China's leading banks.

The banking centre of excellence in China will be staffed with a worldwide team of banking experts and leverage assets, infrastructures and deep skills from across IBM to develop local banking value-add offerings, form strategy for payment and core system renovation, and improve performance and scalability of existing architecture.

The centre will offer high-end, banking industry related expertise to tackle critical customer needs and to bring global reach to the local banking clients. IBM's worldwide banking centre of excellence has already been working with many of the leading banks in China to help modernise their back-office operations.

With the IBM worldwide banking centre of excellence in China and other existing IBM resources such as the China System Centre, the local banks will benefit from IBM's ability to quickly assemble a targeted set of skills, capabilities and business frameworks to meet the clients' exact requirements -- from end-to-end services and technologies, industry expertise, to independent software vendors (ISV) collaboration.