Tata Consultancy Services, one of the world's largest software and services consulting firms, will use China as a global sourcing base for this part of the world and expand its reach to Japan and South Korea from Beijing, a senior company executive said in Beijing.

"For us, China is a strategic move. It is not like opening in country A or B. We are going to use China as a global sourcing base for this part of the world," Girija Pande, regional director for TCS in the Asia Pacific, told PTI.

"We have now the English-speaking world out of India and the Mandarin-speaking world out of China," Pande, who is also chairman of Tata Information Technology (Shanghai) -- a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd -- which was launched in June last year as part of a strategic plan to bolster its presence in the Asia Pacific region.

Explaining the company's first year of operations in China, Pande said he is satisfied by the initial breakthroughs and the exposure it got, and the active support from the Chinese government.

"Today, we have offices in Shanghai and Beijing as well as a software development centre in Hangzhou. TCS currently employs 120 IT professionals, 80 per cent of whom are Chinese," he said.

Pande said that TCS has made inroads into various market segments in China, including manufacturing, telecommunications and the financial services industries by forming marketing alliances with local companies.

While TCS has formed a marketing alliance with Zoom network for the telecom sector, the company has inked another marketing venture with Pan Sky for the banking and financial sector.

"We are now actively looking at the domestic Chinese market," he said, adding that along with the Chinese partners, the company has submitted various proposals to local entities.

The first breakthrough in the Chinese market came in the form of a short consulting assignment for the Shenzhen Development Bank, based in Shenzhen.

"We did the information technology architecture for the bank," he said, adding that TCS provided the architecture for Shenzhen Development Bank to move away from wholesale banking to retail banking. 

TCS also participated in a bid for a major IT contract for the Shanghai Stock Exchange and was short-listed among the last four from a list of 33 before losing out. 

Though disappointed, Pande said the company did well to compete with world majors like IBM and HP for the SSE project, which happened within just one year of operations in Beijing.

Pande was also highly optimistic about the company's potential growth in off-shoring its jobs from Japan and South Korean into China.

Rajanna, general manager of Tata Information Technology (Shanghai), said the software development centre in Hangzhou is fully functional. 

TCS will use the software development centre to provide end-to-end services for clients over the Asia Pacific region, in coordination with TCS' delivery centres in India.

Explaining TCS' success in China, Pande said it has come as a result of the long-term strategic planning and the company's expertise garnered from working with over 1,000 clients in 53 countries.