Animation industry to reach $ 869mln by 2010

New Delhi, June 22 (UNI) India's animation industry is estimated to reach 869 million dollars by 2010 from the current 285 million dollars, an industry body has said.

The global growth of the sector is projected to grow to 35 billion dollars from 25 billion dollars in the next three years, a Nasscom study said.

As a result, the demand for animation professionals will rise to around three lakhs in the next two to three years, the study pointed out.

The growth is fuelled as India has emerged as a destination of choice for outsourcing work and is gaining advantage over countries like Japan, China, South Korea and Philippines.

Indian animators, today, are becoming a natural choice the world-over due to their familiarity advantage with English.

Thus, India is the hottest outsourcing destination, the study revealed.

The animation industry is into various segments of entertainment, education, web designing, medicine, defence and gaming.

The entertainment animation industry has been the chief driver for growth with all major channels like television, movies, direct to DVD, special effects recording strong sustained growth.

A US-based Turner Entertainment Networks, this week, allianced with Miditech, Graphiti Multimedia and Famous Studios, Indian production houses to produce animated films and television series.

This was in line with the Disney, Yash Raj Films partnership to create Disney branded animated films.

Also, a lot of appreciation has been received for movies like Spiderman-3, Hanuman, Krishna, Dhoom, Krishh amongst many others.

The Indian production houses inking deals with international companies need to take the initiative to train and retain employees.

This is true for animation houses which find India attractive because of the lower labour costs.

The education animation industry is a rapidly growing segment fuelled by cost efficiency and high effectiveness. Stimulating propeller dynamics being one of the examples.

The gaming animation industry, on the other hand, is set for phenomenal growth with the mobile phones becoming more and more content savvy.

However, various 2D and 3D illustrations are being used for the depiction of complex medical procedures. This can be used for training and ancillary services like healthcare research, patents and legal claims. Also, this is used for training in defence.

But the study also revealed that the country at present simply doesn't have the requisite number of trained manpower to deliver the services. Qualitative world-class training on leading and relevant technologies is the need of the hour.

Future, thereby seems very bright for the Indian animation industry, the study pointed.

UNI