IIHT plans 100 centres overseas

After establishing its presence in China, IT training company Indian Institute of Hardware Technology (IIHT) has its eyes set on the emerging markets. The Bangalore-headquartered IT hardware training firm is planning to set up 100 centres globally in the next three years.

Essentially looking at the franchisee model, the company is eyeing countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Mauritius and Egypt for providing hardware training. At present, IIHT has five centres in Africa and one in Turkey.

“We are planning to join hands with local business partners. The tie-ups will be such that IIHT will get 20 per cent of the revenue generated by each of these centres,” said IIHT CEO

N Keshav Raju. The hardware training firm also plans to open 80 new centres in India by the end of this financial year. “At present we have about 220 centres and we intend to establish our presence in tier III as well as tier IV cities,” Raju added.

On the firm’s operations in China, Raju said that while its earlier plans of setting up 100 centres in China by 2009 have been delayed, it is confident of achieving this target by 2012. IIHT has 14 centres in China from which it generates 5 per cent of its revenue.

It has already signed up with 10 colleges in India to provide training to students on infrastructure management services (IMS). By the year end, IIHT will scale up this number to 100 colleges across the nation.

It has also started working with the government to capture vocational education segment in India. “The government is increasingly showing more interest in vocational education and also investing money in this sector. We being a niche player would like to make full use of that space,” he said.