Microsoft vs. Infosys

I just discovered that Yahoo! Finance is one of the best resources on the web to get quick stats on any company – size, market cap, cash flow, share prices, financial history, analysis – you name it, they got it!
Anyways, so a few days back I was in a meeting when the growth rates of Indian companies such as Infosys and TCS was being discussed. Out of curiosity, I wanted to get a feel for how say Infosys stacked up against say Microsoft. So I went and dug up some numbers from Yahoo Finance.
Infosys (with around 49,422 employees, as of 31st Dec 05) is almost half the size of Microsoft, however, its market capitalization trail M$ by a factor of 7. The yearly revenue of Infosys is almost a 20th of Microsoft’s. On the other hand, Infosys is trying to grow to around 70,000 people in the next two years. I haven’t read of any such expansion plans from Microsoft.
To puts things in a little perspective, Google’s is around a 10th the size of Microsoft, while its market capitalization is already about half of M$. Google’s annual revenue is around a sixth of Microsoft’s.
But what do all these numbers mean? Honestly, I don’t really know. I hope some of my learned friends will be able to shed some more light on this. I just have some qualitative comments to make.
The first surprising thing to me was that Infosys was already so big (in number of employees). I mean, comparing it with M$, I’m actually amazed that they are able to sustain such a large working force. I guess thats one of the advantages of being based in India – a big company can save billions in salaries, employment benefits and taxes. Though I don’t know enough to make any claims, I feel slightly worried whether Infosys will be able to attain its target growth rate, unless its revenues and assets grow in proportion.
There was a news story in Time a couple of weeks back on how Ford Motors is struggling to get back into the US auto market. They mentioned that back in the 90s, Ford was losing around $250 per car manufactured (because of the employment benefits, health care etc that they had to provide), while Toyota was making more than a 1000 dollars on similar priced cars because they weren’t incurring these costs. Sounds somewhat similar to what Microsoft is/would be dealing with as companies like Infosys encroach its markets?
I was also a bit taken aback by Google’s figures. I mean sure Google’s been all over the news since like forever, but I had never actually taken a look at concrete numbers before. This is a crude way to look at it, but one way to visualize Google’s figures is to imagine it being roughly twice as productive as M$ on a yearly basis, and almost five times as valuable. Its truly remarkable. Google has also been growing at an almost alarming rate – almost a 100% growth rate in the past few months I believe (I think they were recruiting 100 new people every week at one point). I read somewhere that they will probably slow down their growth in this coming year, but its still quite remarkable.
Note that Infosys’s target growth rate is actually almost similar. I’m quite curious as to what kind of strategy Infosys is taking to achieve its goal. Its probably in Infosys’s favor that its not on the radar of newsmongers like Google is. IIUC, even HCL (my former company) and TCS are on similar growth curves. I’ll try and read up a little more on their plans and post an update if I find something interesting.