India has the potential to be a bigger market than United States: William Meaney, Global CEO, Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain is ramping up significant momentum in the Indian market as it sees huge adoption for its services in India, especially in regulated sectors such as banking, healthcare, insurance and telecom. William Meaney, President & Global CEO, Iron Mountain and Hitesh Gupta, Managing Director – Iron Mountain – India, share their perspective on the massive opportunity in the Indian market.
Some edited excerpts:

How do you see the opportunity in India from Iron Mountain’s point of view?

William Meaney: In the last one year, we have doubled the size of our business. We are in the early part of finding our full potential in the Indian market. That’s partly because we now have the critical infrastructure and have opened about 14 hubs in India which covers 90 percent of the banking locations in the country. We now also have a new management team that has the skills and the experience that has been able to attract a number of colleagues which we did not have couple of years ago.

How different would your positioning be over other similar competitors?

William Meaney: Earlier, there were two global players in the industry, us and Recall. Recall was one fourth of our size. We bought Recall about some months ago, and now we are the only global player in our industry. This allows us to ensure the local market that they are getting the global best practices and understanding about the complexity of compliance especially in the financial services space.

Are there any other specific industries which are driving growth faster than other sectors?

Hitesh Gupta: In India, you bifurcate the industries into two segments, the private and the public. In the private segment, the major customer inflow comes from the BFSI sector. Another sector which is growing fast is the NBFC and the health sector. In the health sector there is an immense increase in the requirement on the regulatory side and the FDA audits and the clinical research.  A lot of these TPAs have come up and they require these kind of services. In some of the manufacturing conglomerates in India, we have seen that there is an increase in the demand in the way they have kept their records. They also need a structured way to manage their production houses for their taxation purposes or their financial accounting purpose.

So we have seen a lot of traction on the private side. On the public side, a lot of public sector banks have started outsourcing their records management to the service providers. And in central government, we do have a few taxation authorities which we cater to in Bombay, Delhi and Hyderabad. And we see there is a tremendous potential there in terms of central government, state sponsored enterprises, public sector banks and the autonomous bodies like ONGCs and Oil Corporations. We do see a lot of documents being generated in the Government and they are also increasingly going the digital way.

How does India fit in the overall global sphere of things? How important is India as a strategic market for you?

Hitesh Gupta : India is a an extremely strategic market for Iron Mountain. India plays a very important role. India’s GDP growth is around 8 to 9 percent and in a bad financial crisis, it was 6 percent. BFSI is growing in India and a lot of rural banking initiatives are taking place. We are also seeing increasing banking penetration in the lower pyramid of the society. These trends excite us at Iron Mountain and hence India is really in a bright spot in the overall scheme of things.

On the investment side, Iron Mountain is very serious on our India perspective and we do have some plans to acquire more companies in India, expand our customer base and increase the revenue. We also have a greenfield expansion plan where we want to invest $20 to $30 million immediately on a capex plan. All of these things do say that we have an aggressive plan for India and we do have the plan to grow in the same speed in the next five years.

Your recent press release says that your customer base has gone from 700 customers to 2,200 customers in India and you have doubled revenues in the past one year. How do you see future growth for your firm?

William Meaney: We have a stated purpose to be the market leader wherever we operate. The fact that we hired the managing director from the market leader before and being close to the same size as the market leader here already, we can expect our India presence to grow both organically and inorganically because we think that the Indian market is extremely attractive. Both for macro-economic reasons (how well the Indian economy is doing and the access to well trained and educated people), as well as where it is in the outsourcing space.

This is the market where I feel we are still scratching the surface. India should be bigger than United States when it comes to record management no matter what metric you look at, it’s a fraction of the size of North America. So we are in the early days where people are still understanding the efficiency and the quality they can get from an outsourced agency in records management. I am very very excited about what our potential is and what the team now can deliver in India.

You have spoken about your focus on regulated industries like banking, financial services and telecom. Is there a strategy to go beyond these markets?

William Meaney: We typically focus on things which are high on compliance, high on security andhave high regulatory aspects. So naturally, you will see us in healthcare and financial services which include both banking, insurance and government related services but additionally you will also find us in life sciences.

Globally, we have a large presence in life sciences because of the need for proper record keeping. To be able to keep proper information takes significant amounts of time and you will also find our very large presence in Oil and Gas because it’s not just about storing paper documents but we store core samples in number of locations which are the samples which they take when they are doing exploratory wells and they remove from the ground to do geological survey. We also serve the largest manufacturing companies of the world. Typically that is for blueprints and engineering documents and of course the financial documents which they need to preserve for a long period of time.