Evidence has been uncovered that links alleged Laotian drug kingpin Xaysana Keopimpha to a network suspected of selling drugs in Thailand’s South and also Malaysia.

Narcotics Control Board secretary general Sirinya Sitthichai confirmed a link had been established between the network of Bulan Tareeseub and Xaysana.

“They have had some connections,” Sirinya said. Last month, police nabbed Xaysana at Suvarnabhumi Airport.

Bulan, meanwhile, was arrested alongside Jitpanu Saeheng at a safe house in Songkhla’s Hat Yai district on Thursday on drug-related charges. Cash and jewellery were found in their possession.

Bulan’s assets worth more than Bt68 million (S$2.76 million) have already been confiscated pending the investigation.

According to authorities, Bulan is married to Mamarussan Darormae – who was arrested in Malaysia in 2014 on drug offences.

“Following the arrest of her husband, she has allegedly continued the drug trade,” Sirinya said.

Sirinya said that major drug suspect Kamarudin bin Awang, who is known in Thailand as Zainudeng Ma and was nabbed in Malaysia earlier this week, was a part of Xaysana’s alleged network.

Read also: Malaysian linked to Laos drug lord arrested

Narcotics Suppression Bureau’s spokesman Pol Maj-General Sunthorn Chalermkiat, meanwhile, said his agency was now taking over the investigation into a recent big haul of illicit drugs in Bangkok’s Nong Chok district to assess its possible link to Xaysana.

“Local police have forwarded the investigation on the drug seizure to us to facilitate the expanding probe into Xaysana’s alleged drug network in Thailand,” Sunthorn said yesterday.

On Thursday night, police found 2.67 million methamphetamine tablets, 7 kilos of crystal meth-amphetamine, 5 kilos of ketamine, and 34,000 ecstasy pills at a house in Nong Chok. Arrested at the house was Anon Laokasem, 24.

According to police, Anon has confessed that he was paid to stock and deliver the illicit drugs. He has received Bt700,000 after he completed the deliveries of the first lot of drugs during the past two months.

Police are now expanding their investigation into Xaysana’s alleged drug network. Xaysana, who had long portrayed himself as a rich and well-connected man from Laos, is believed to have had extensive connections on Thai soil.

Earlier this month, famous motorcycle racer Akarakit “Benz Racing” Worarohcharoendet became the first Thai celebrity to have surfaced in the Xaysana’s scandal.

Read also: Suspected drug lord linked to Thailand and Laos celebrities

One of Xaysana’s alleged accomplices, Nattapon Nakkam, said he had used Akarakit’s name in buying a Lamborghini and a big bike.

The two vehicles have now been seized pending further investigation alongside 10 other items of assets linked to Nattapon.

After publicly mentioning the questionable Lamborghini early this month, the NSB has received several reports of suspicious super cars from people.

“Thank you for sending information to us. We are in the process of verifying the report,” Sunthorn said.

He added that the NSB was now checking into the reports that a man in Pathum Thani’s Lam Luk Ka district had surprisingly owned more than 40 luxury cars.

“We will check if he has engaged in illicit drug trade,” Sunthorn said.

HONG KONG – Missing China-born billionaire Xiao Jianhua was whisked in a wheelchair from a luxury Hong Kong hotel in the early hours of Jan 27 with his head covered, a source close to the businessman told Reuters.

Xiao was carried into his own car at the entrance to the Four Seasons serviced apartments in the heart of the Asian financial hub in what appeared to be a “smooth operation”, another source with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The comments from the sources confirmed a report in the New York Times on the disappearance of Xiao, who has close ties to senior Chinese officials and their families.

Despite a statement issued in Xiao’s name over 10 days ago that he was seeking medical treatment overseas and had not been abducted, his disappearance has rekindled fears over Hong Kong’s status as an independent judicial entity of China.

“It is uncertain if Xiao was conscious when he left,” the second source said, adding that it took at least a few people to carry the billionaire into the car.

“There was no struggle in the whole process. You could even say it was efficient. It was a smooth operation.”

Reuters could not independently verify the circumstances at the time Xiao was taken out of the hotel or the condition of his health.

Read also: Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua abducted by security agents in Hong Kong: Reports

Assistants of Xiao were waiting in the lobby of the hotel’s serviced apartments when at least five people, dressed in casual attire, came in, said the second source, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue.

The group, which some media have reported were mainland Chinese agents, were escorted to Xiao’s room by his assistants and they left shortly after with the businessman and some luggage, the second source said.

The source close to Xiao who said the billionaire left the hotel in a wheelchair said his head was covered with some cloth, but it was not clear what the material was. The source added that as far as he knew Xiao did not use a wheelchair and there was nothing wrong with his legs.

A Hong Kong police source who was briefed on the probe into Xiao’s disappearance had previously told Reuters the case was initially treated as a “kidnapping” following a complaint from someone connected to Xiao.

But after a review of CCTV footage at the Four Seasons and at the border checkpoint, police concluded that Xiao had voluntarily left Hong Kong.

They said Xiao had entered mainland China through a border checkpoint on Jan 27 and that they were seeking more information on the case from Chinese authorities.

Police and the Four Seasons did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

China’s Ministry of State Security, Foreign Ministry and Public Security Bureau have so far not responded to Reuters requests for comment on whether Chinese agents were involved in Xiao’s disappearance.

CORRUPTION CRACKDOWN

Xiao’s disappearance has sparked widespread media speculation that he has been drawn into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption, which has ensnared a string of Chinese executives.

Any indication that Xiao may have been forcibly removed from the former British colony would be a breach of the “one country, two systems” framework under which it has been governed since its return to mainland Chinese rule in 1997.

Xiao’s case has already spooked many mainland Chinese working in the city, with some already making contingency plans and seeking advice on moving assets overseas.

Another source close to Xiao said his immediate family and the company’s senior executives witnessed nothing unusual ahead of his disappearance.

Xiao’s wife and brother were not in Hong Kong when he left the Four Seasons, the third source said, declining to say where they were at the time.

They immediately rushed back to Hong Kong, the source said. “Everybody freaked out,” the source said. “Nobody knew where he went, nobody knew what was happening.”

Xiao’s wife and brother have already “fled” Hong Kong to Canada, according to the third source.

Xiao’s family, company executives and lawyers wrote a statement in Xiao’s name “in a rush” to quell speculation that the billionaire had been kidnapped, the source said.

The statement, published on the front page of Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper five days after he went missing, said he was seeking medical treatment “outside the country” and “had not been abducted to the mainland.”

It is uncertain if the family had been in touch with Xiao when the statement was drafted.

Outside law enforcement agencies, including those from mainland China, are not authorised to operate in Hong Kong, which enjoys wide-ranging freedoms not allowed on the mainland, including a separate legal system.

Police commissioner Lo Wai-chung said in a radio talk show last Saturday that there was no sign of mainland authorities enforcing the law in Hong Kong.

Xiao, who runs Tomorrow Holdings, a financial group headquartered in Beijing, was ranked 32nd on the 2016 Hurun China rich list, China’s equivalent of the Forbes list, with an estimated net worth of US$5.97 billion (S$8.48 billion).

At least two of Tomorrow Group’s statements posted after Xiao’s disappearance on their social media account were deleted, pointing to what appears to be heightened sensitivity in Beijing over the case.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Toru Iwatani and Satoshi Tajiri may not be household names, but they have clearly left their mark on the world.

They are the creators of Super Mario, Pac-Man and Pokemon respectively, and they can be said to be the “robber barons” of Japan’s creative industry, tapping the nation’s unique cultural DNA to create characters that have stolen hearts all over the world.

Several events last year ensured that Japan’s characters stayed at the top of people’s minds. There were the launches of smartphone games Pokemon Go and Mario Run, while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared in Super Mario’s iconic red cap at the Rio Olympics closing ceremony.

Of course, there was also the mega box office hit Kimi No Na Wa (Your Name).

Japan’s creative scene, often referred to as ACG (animation, comics and games), has the backing of a multibillion-dollar “Cool Japan” fund as part of a strategic push, both at home and abroad.

Popular characters such as Astro Boy and Sailor Moon are also emblazoned on official merchandise for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

But even so, observers in the ACG industry have told The Straits Times about their fears of a bleak future, given an insular mindset and increasing competition.

COOL JAPAN

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Meti) is in charge of the country’s Cool Japan blueprint, through which Japan wants to raise the presence and appeal of its cultural products abroad – including those of its small and medium-sized companies.

A ministry report issued last April showed that the market size of Japan’s content industry, which includes ACG as well as TV drama and music, in 2013 was around 12 trillion yen (S$150 billion).

The Japanese market for content industries may be second only to the United States – worth over 2.5 times more – but Meti noted that growth was slowing and the industry ought to increase its presence in foreign markets.

It proposed a strategy based on promoting the appeal of Japanese culture overseas in order to boost sales of Japanese content products.

Companies appear to already be doing so – to a certain extent .

The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) valued the anime industry at 1.83 trillion yen in 2015, up 12 per cent from 2014.

The engine behind this rise was the 583.3 billion yen clocked abroad, the highest figure ever and a 78.7 per cent surge from 2014.

The evident appeal of Japan’s ACG industry also means there is no lack of entrants, both Japanese and foreigners. One of them is Penang native Chuah Zean, 22, who grew up indulging in anime and manga series such as Naruto, Gundam and One Piece.

Now a final-year undergraduate at Tokyo’s Digital Hollywood University, he said with a chuckle that in the past, he would sometimes spend entire days devouring anime and manga.

Mr Chuah, who specialises in computer game design, said: “I love Japan’s kawaii (cute) characters, and the very novel stories with interesting and diverse plot lines.”

His schoolmate Yuto Kuriyama, 19, hopes to be a movie director. His “all-time favourite” is the City Hunter spy series that has spun a Hong Kong movie, a Korean drama and a Japanese video game.

It was also the love for video gaming that led Mr Michael Susetyo, 28, to the industry. The programmer for Japan’s SquareEnix was part of the 200-strong team behind last year’s Final Fantasy XV game.

The alumnus of DigiPen Institute of Technology in Washington told The Straits Times: “In the past, I was very much into Japanese hairstyles and rock bands, so the designs of the main characters also line up very well with what I consider as ‘cool’ video game characters, as well as being instantly recognisable as Final Fantasy characters.”

CHOPPY WATERS AHEAD?

But working in the industry has got Mr Susetyo worried that Japan will not be able to keep up with Western studios.

He did not cite specific games, but titles that topped bestseller lists last year include Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare, published by US firm Activision, and Grand Theft Auto V, a British export but now published by New York’s Rockstar.

And then there are studios such as the US’ Electronic Arts, which is behind sports titles such as Fifa and franchises such as The Sims.

Mr Susetyo said that English standards have to be improved to allow Japan to “continue to reach new heights at the same pace as the West”.

He added: “Technology evolves from the spread of information, and with so much information on the Internet being available in English only, it takes much longer for information to reach Japanese developers.”

This point was also raised by Mr Hisatsugu Kasajima, founder of the Japan arm of Czech production house Eallin. The 40-year-old, who started the outfit in 2010, attributes the lack of interest in English to an insular, inward-looking mindset perpetrated by the bursting of an economic bubble in the late 1980s that has led to stagnation.

This is the reason why creators tend to cater to a domestic market which thrives on sub-cultures that might not take flight elsewhere, AJA vice-secretary-general Naoki Ishikawa said.

Many domestically popular series contain explicitly sexual and violent scenes, or fantasies that might not be easily understood or accepted elsewhere in the world, he said, adding that the global success of movies such as Kimi No Na Wa is “rare”.

Moreover, Japanese animation studio Studio Colorido’s founder Hideo Uda, 38, noted that the anime industry is hindered “from becoming a major player like Disney or Pixar” because it uses traditional pen-and-paper methods, which he said are increasingly unproductive in a fast-moving industry.

“As craftsmen, they have very good techniques. That is an advantage,” Mr Uda said.

“But it is also a disadvantage. Innovation hardly takes place and not many people can be involved in the process. So it will remain a domestic industry without any cross-border collaboration.”

Given that ACG is a costly business, Mr Ishikawa observed how companies are trying to “mitigate risks by sharing the burden across several stakeholders” – which means that the future of the anime industry will “lie in the hands of the financiers, not the creators”.

But the industry has had a record of not having a pulse on the market. A recent example was historical anime Kono Sekai No Katasumi Ni (In This Corner Of The World), which was a sleeper hit in Japan. It failed to get financial backing and was produced only after it raised funds through crowdfunding.

The emergence of new publishing platforms has also threatened manga circulation numbers, and editor Yoshinori Iwai of the Comic Beam arm of publisher Kadokawa fears the market is “shrinking day by day”, even as market saturation is a growing issue. This trend has resulted in artists becoming more realistic about their chances of succeeding, he observed.

One example is Ms Yuka Okuyama, 40, an up-and-coming name in his stable of 200 artists. Awarded the New Face Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2015 for her debut manga Tamashii Ippai (Lots Of Life), she works full time as a librarian in a children’s library and freelances as a picture book illustrator.

Mr Iwai said: “In the past, almost all artists were desperate to publish their work because the market is very hard (to break into) and very big. But now it’s got to a point where people are less desperate. Many comic artists have had to think about their future.”

And this is a double-edged sword, as it could affect the industry’s output, he said. Ms Okuyama creates a new manga story only “about once or twice a year”.

Creators say the Cool Japan strategy is sorely in need of an additional thrust: to groom and support upcoming talent and companies to lay the groundwork for the future.

“It is pointless if Cool Japan ends up being focused on funding ‘quantifiable projects’, such as overseas cosplay or anime events where attendance numbers can be easily monitored,” Mr Uda said.

Mr Kasajima added: “While it is not a bad idea to promote Japanese creative concepts to the world, it will benefit Japan in the long run if more money can be properly channelled into developing new resources or subsidising young directors.”

waltsim@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on Feb 11, 2017.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Toru Iwatani and Satoshi Tajiri may not be household names, but they have clearly left their mark on the world.

They are the creators of Super Mario, Pac-Man and Pokemon respectively, and they can be said to be the “robber barons” of Japan’s creative industry, tapping the nation’s unique cultural DNA to create characters that have stolen hearts all over the world.

Several events last year ensured that Japan’s characters stayed at the top of people’s minds. There were the launches of smartphone games Pokemon Go and Mario Run, while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared in Super Mario’s iconic red cap at the Rio Olympics closing ceremony.

Of course, there was also the mega box office hit Kimi No Na Wa (Your Name).

Japan’s creative scene, often referred to as ACG (animation, comics and games), has the backing of a multibillion-dollar “Cool Japan” fund as part of a strategic push, both at home and abroad.

Popular characters such as Astro Boy and Sailor Moon are also emblazoned on official merchandise for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

But even so, observers in the ACG industry have told The Straits Times about their fears of a bleak future, given an insular mindset and increasing competition.

COOL JAPAN

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Meti) is in charge of the country’s Cool Japan blueprint, through which Japan wants to raise the presence and appeal of its cultural products abroad – including those of its small and medium-sized companies.

A ministry report issued last April showed that the market size of Japan’s content industry, which includes ACG as well as TV drama and music, in 2013 was around 12 trillion yen (S$150 billion).

The Japanese market for content industries may be second only to the United States – worth over 2.5 times more – but Meti noted that growth was slowing and the industry ought to increase its presence in foreign markets.

It proposed a strategy based on promoting the appeal of Japanese culture overseas in order to boost sales of Japanese content products.

Companies appear to already be doing so – to a certain extent .

The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) valued the anime industry at 1.83 trillion yen in 2015, up 12 per cent from 2014.

The engine behind this rise was the 583.3 billion yen clocked abroad, the highest figure ever and a 78.7 per cent surge from 2014.

The evident appeal of Japan’s ACG industry also means there is no lack of entrants, both Japanese and foreigners. One of them is Penang native Chuah Zean, 22, who grew up indulging in anime and manga series such as Naruto, Gundam and One Piece.

Now a final-year undergraduate at Tokyo’s Digital Hollywood University, he said with a chuckle that in the past, he would sometimes spend entire days devouring anime and manga.

Mr Chuah, who specialises in computer game design, said: “I love Japan’s kawaii (cute) characters, and the very novel stories with interesting and diverse plot lines.”

His schoolmate Yuto Kuriyama, 19, hopes to be a movie director. His “all-time favourite” is the City Hunter spy series that has spun a Hong Kong movie, a Korean drama and a Japanese video game.

It was also the love for video gaming that led Mr Michael Susetyo, 28, to the industry. The programmer for Japan’s SquareEnix was part of the 200-strong team behind last year’s Final Fantasy XV game.

The alumnus of DigiPen Institute of Technology in Washington told The Straits Times: “In the past, I was very much into Japanese hairstyles and rock bands, so the designs of the main characters also line up very well with what I consider as ‘cool’ video game characters, as well as being instantly recognisable as Final Fantasy characters.”

CHOPPY WATERS AHEAD?

But working in the industry has got Mr Susetyo worried that Japan will not be able to keep up with Western studios.

He did not cite specific games, but titles that topped bestseller lists last year include Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare, published by US firm Activision, and Grand Theft Auto V, a British export but now published by New York’s Rockstar.

And then there are studios such as the US’ Electronic Arts, which is behind sports titles such as Fifa and franchises such as The Sims.

Mr Susetyo said that English standards have to be improved to allow Japan to “continue to reach new heights at the same pace as the West”.

He added: “Technology evolves from the spread of information, and with so much information on the Internet being available in English only, it takes much longer for information to reach Japanese developers.”

This point was also raised by Mr Hisatsugu Kasajima, founder of the Japan arm of Czech production house Eallin. The 40-year-old, who started the outfit in 2010, attributes the lack of interest in English to an insular, inward-looking mindset perpetrated by the bursting of an economic bubble in the late 1980s that has led to stagnation.

This is the reason why creators tend to cater to a domestic market which thrives on sub-cultures that might not take flight elsewhere, AJA vice-secretary-general Naoki Ishikawa said.

Many domestically popular series contain explicitly sexual and violent scenes, or fantasies that might not be easily understood or accepted elsewhere in the world, he said, adding that the global success of movies such as Kimi No Na Wa is “rare”.

Moreover, Japanese animation studio Studio Colorido’s founder Hideo Uda, 38, noted that the anime industry is hindered “from becoming a major player like Disney or Pixar” because it uses traditional pen-and-paper methods, which he said are increasingly unproductive in a fast-moving industry.

“As craftsmen, they have very good techniques. That is an advantage,” Mr Uda said.

“But it is also a disadvantage. Innovation hardly takes place and not many people can be involved in the process. So it will remain a domestic industry without any cross-border collaboration.”

Given that ACG is a costly business, Mr Ishikawa observed how companies are trying to “mitigate risks by sharing the burden across several stakeholders” – which means that the future of the anime industry will “lie in the hands of the financiers, not the creators”.

But the industry has had a record of not having a pulse on the market. A recent example was historical anime Kono Sekai No Katasumi Ni (In This Corner Of The World), which was a sleeper hit in Japan. It failed to get financial backing and was produced only after it raised funds through crowdfunding.

The emergence of new publishing platforms has also threatened manga circulation numbers, and editor Yoshinori Iwai of the Comic Beam arm of publisher Kadokawa fears the market is “shrinking day by day”, even as market saturation is a growing issue. This trend has resulted in artists becoming more realistic about their chances of succeeding, he observed.

One example is Ms Yuka Okuyama, 40, an up-and-coming name in his stable of 200 artists. Awarded the New Face Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2015 for her debut manga Tamashii Ippai (Lots Of Life), she works full time as a librarian in a children’s library and freelances as a picture book illustrator.

Mr Iwai said: “In the past, almost all artists were desperate to publish their work because the market is very hard (to break into) and very big. But now it’s got to a point where people are less desperate. Many comic artists have had to think about their future.”

And this is a double-edged sword, as it could affect the industry’s output, he said. Ms Okuyama creates a new manga story only “about once or twice a year”.

Creators say the Cool Japan strategy is sorely in need of an additional thrust: to groom and support upcoming talent and companies to lay the groundwork for the future.

“It is pointless if Cool Japan ends up being focused on funding ‘quantifiable projects’, such as overseas cosplay or anime events where attendance numbers can be easily monitored,” Mr Uda said.

Mr Kasajima added: “While it is not a bad idea to promote Japanese creative concepts to the world, it will benefit Japan in the long run if more money can be properly channelled into developing new resources or subsidising young directors.”

waltsim@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on Feb 11, 2017.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

The phone call between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping took a long time to come because the new administration was pondering over how to deal with America’s relations with China, as an analyst put it.

But it could also be that Beijing drove a hard bargain during the discussion on the contents of the call, particularly on the issue of the “one China” policy, a cornerstone of bilateral ties since both sides established formal relations in 1979.

What is clear is that Mr Trump and his team have made a decision to adhere to the “one China” policy, paving the way for bilateral ties to develop, though challenges remain.

Mr Trump had, as president-elect, questioned the “one China” policy – in which Washington recognises Beijing as the sole government of China – suggesting that he might use it as a bargaining chip to gain concessions from China.

This had angered Beijing, which saw the policy – in which the United States also acknowledges China’s position that there is only one China and that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to that one China – as non-negotiable.

“The ‘one China’ policy is a bottom line (for China). It is the basis for establishing diplomatic ties and the precondition for the development of political and other ties between the two sides,” explained Professor Jia Qingguo, dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University.

He noted that preceding US governments, Republican or Democratic, adhered to it because it was in the US’ interests to do so. “Of course, it also conforms to China’s interests,” he added.

The Trump administration needed to make a decision on the issue “in order to co-operate with China bilaterally, regionally and globally, and to protect its interests”, he said. But while an obstacle to the development of bilateral ties has been removed, many other problems must be dealt with, he added. These include Mr Trump’s threat to declare China a currency manipulator and impose heavy tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as security issues.

But analysts agree that the other challenges are more manageable.

“Trade issues are easier for Beijing to engage in negotiation on and to even consider concessions,” said Associate Professor Li Mingjiang of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

Agreeing, Peking University’s Professor Zha Daojiong said this was not the first time that the two sides have had disputes over trade, and that they could go through due process of settlement via the World Trade Organisation.

As for the South China Sea issue, about which Mr Trump and his team had made strident remarks, particularly over China’s building of artificial islands on reefs it controls, their recent statements have been less provocative, noted Prof Li.

Earlier remarks – US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during his confirmation hearing last month that China should not be allowed access to the artificial islands – showed the Trump administration did not understand the region’s security issues. Then, last Saturday, US Defence Secretary James Mattis said in Tokyo that there was no need for “dramatic military moves”, and instead called for “diplomatic efforts” to resolve the South China Sea disputes. The new statements show that the team now has a better understanding of regional security issues, said Prof Li. These statements were also reassuring for the Chinese.

Still, while China’s anxieties have been reduced somewhat, concerns remain as there is still much uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration, he added.

suinoi@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on Feb 11, 2017.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

As the United States looks at tightening visa rules for skilled foreign workers, concerns are mounting that India’s software industry will take a hit.

US President Donald Trump has drafted a proposal to tighten work visa programmes, including the H-1B visa which is used by Indian software companies to send Indian engineers to the US.

Legislation was also introduced in the US Congress late last month, raising minimum salaries under the H-1B work visa scheme from US$60,000 (S$85,300) to US$100,000 a year.

Experts believe that any tinkering of the work visa programmewill push up costs, affecting not just India’s sizeable software industry but also US firms that use these services. As many as 85,000 H-1B visas are issued by the US authorities every year, with most going to skilled workers from India.

Top Indian IT companies get as much as 60 per cent of their revenue from the US. “If visas are reduced or banned, there will be a deep impact over time for service providers, though new technology could mitigate part of the impact,” said Mr Mohandas Pai, a tech investor and former director of Infosys.

India’s outsourcing industry has grown over the last three decades as Western companies farm out maintenance work to India, which provides cheap labour. Indian software companies such as Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys in turn send their engineers to the US for projects under the work visa. There are currently over 300,000 Indian engineers working for clients in the US.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) will send a delegation to the US to lobby for industry interests later this month. A Nasscom official said the US faces a shortage of people with requisite skills, a point the association will make to the Trump administration.

“The US Department of Labour stated that there will be 2.4 million unfilled Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) jobs by 2018, more than 50 per cent are in computer and IT-related areas. That is the gap that needs to be bridged,” said Mr Shivendra Singh, vice-president and head of global trade development at Nasscom.

“We are a net creator of jobs bringing value to American corporates and the American economy.”

News of the legislation to raise minimum salaries has already been felt, with shares of IT companies falling last week.

The threat of protectionism has been hanging over the software industry for some time, with some companies already looking for newer markets in Latin America. Tata Consultancy Services, for example, said it applied for 14,000 US work visas in 2015 but only 2,000 last year.

Some believe that increasing local hires in the US could help remove the perception of the industry being just a provider of cheap back-office work. Others believe the tightening of visa rules will push Indian firms towards high-end offerings sooner.

“They have to get into high-value services like machine-learning automation and minimise dependence on just onsite services,” said Mr Ramesh Loganathan, former president of Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association.

“Still, what would have taken five years will now happen in two years due to protectionism.”

gnirmala@sph.com.sg

US$118b

Value of India’s IT outsourcing industry (S$167 billion)

4m

Number of people employed by the industry

60 per cent

Percentage of revenue which comes from the US market

Read also: Silicon Valley puts money and muscle into fighting Trump immigrant curbs
US appeals court refuses to restore Trump travel ban

This article was first published on Feb 11, 2017.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.