Wal-Mart to issue $1 bn IT contract: Sources

Global retail giant Wal-Mart may be all set to issue an IT contract worth USD 1 billion. CNBC-TV18 learns that it will select upto 10 IT vendors for the contract. CNBC-TV18’s Kritika Saxena reports that the contract, for which the bid will open by July 2010, will span across six to eight years. TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Tech emerge as potential bidders along with IBM and Accenture.

However, Wal-Mart says they do not engage in speculation about IT activities in India.

Here is a verbatim transcript of her comments on CNBC-TV18.

Wal-Mart is all set to issue a large scale IT project. This could be the largest project in the retail space. What we pick up from our sources is that the contract is expected to be valued between USD 800 million to a USD 1 billion. Who are the IT firms?—this is good news for IT companies definitely. It will be too early to talk about the likely contenders but who are the potential bidders?—What we pick up from our sources is that four large-cap Indian IT firms—Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCL Tech would be looking to bid for this project. Even multi-national firms like IBM and Accenture would be looking to bid for these projects. But these are the potential bidders and it’s way too early to comment for these individual companies, since the bids will be open only by approximately July to August 2010.

If you see the recent activities by British Petroleum and Exxon Mobil in the IT space—they have issued large scale contract of USD 1.5 to USD 1 billion but in the retail space this would be the largest so far.

Wal-Mart and obviously individual IT companies too would be looking to see boost in the revenues after this IT contract. These individual IT companies—the plan is to issue about USD 50-100 million individual contracts as spread across, some would be about USD 250-300 million.

When we contracted Wal-Mart for an official comment on this they said that they have several inquiries about their IT activities in India but they do not comment on individual specifications on this.