Shiv Nadar on Globalization

Nadar is credited with steering HCL to create several joint ventures and alliances that aided its emergence as a global technology enterprise — an explicit alliance-led growth model rather than a build-everything-organically approach, distinguishing HCL's expansion strategy from peers like Infosys.

The Foundation states that HCLTech today is a US$14.8 billion global organisation with over 223,000 professionals operating from 60 countries — confirming the Forbes figures and reinforcing the scale at which Nadar's pivots toward engineering R&D and joint-venture-led growth were executed.

Nadar's first international foray came in 1980 through Far East Computers in Singapore, a vehicle to sell IT hardware abroad; it clocked roughly INR 1 million in revenue in its maiden year and established the template of pairing Indian engineering talent with foreign demand — a model the entire Indian IT industry would later scale.

Looking forward in 2006, Nadar predicted that future organisations would resemble IKEA — a brand-franchise model where manufacturing, design and distribution are redistributed across countries — and framed HCL's opportunity around this redistribution of work rather than the maintenance of legacy codebases.