Indian tech workers seek lifelines as Chinese firms exit amid border stand-off and coronavirus pandemic

As firms like Alibaba and Huawei pull out of India or pull back on investments, the country’s army of tech workers are being forced to hunt for new jobs

Some Indian firms have stepped in to fill the void left after apps such as TikTok have been banned, with the hiring market picking up in some instances

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Siva Kumar, centre, with his colleagues in 2018. Photo: Siva Kumar

Luo Ruiyao

Published: 1:00pm, 27 Dec 2020Updated: 9:15pm, 27 Dec 2020

Siva Kumar, 27, has spent the past four years working an array of roles, from designer to operations manager, for Chinese e-commerce companies in India. But all that changed in late April when he lost his job after the company he was working for decided to exit India’s IT hub of Bangalore, due to global logistics disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic and rising anti-China sentiment as the nuclear-powered neighbours remain locked in a stand-off at their Himalayan border.

“Now I have decided to start my own programme from scratch,” Kumar said.

“As a normal boy from a tier-two city who didn’t go to IITs, I don’t feel optimistic [about] finding a role in Indian companies where I can fully contribute my value,” he said, referring to the country’s 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). He holds a degree in computer science from a less-well-known engineering college in Coimbatore, in his home state of Tamil Nadu.

As India’s start-up ecosystem is largely dominated by graduates from the IITs, Kumar thinks his résumé “may not fully show my potential”. He is among the estimated several thousand Indian workers that have lost their jobs at Chinese firms – mostly tech companies – this year.

Over the past five years, India, with its mostly young population of 1.3 billion, has been the go-to market for Chinese companies looking to expand overseas. Since 2015, Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba – which owns the Post – and Tencent have invested in a dozen Indian unicorns, the term used for companies with valuations above US$1 billion, making the country a primary strategic market.

02:05

India bans another 118 Chinese apps as border tensions escalate

On top of this, India’s continually evolving smartphone market also made it a sweet spot for Chinese tech companies. Alibaba’s UC Browser, Tencent’s mobile gaming app PUBG, as well as Bytedance’s TikTok and Helo all had hundreds of millions of users in India before New Delhi’s crackdown on Chinese apps. In addition, the Chinese companies Club Factory and SheIn also enjoyed considerable market share in India’s e-commerce industry.