And so it goes. Offstage from last week’s main financial dramas, a fight breaks out between two Indian IT giants, both bidding to buy the British tech consultancy Axon. It looks like a sign of things to come.

“One of our strategies is to reduce our dependence on America,” explains Infosys boss Kris Gopalakrishnan, in Indian-inflected English, “and to increase our revenues from Europe and the rest of the world. We also want to do more value-added services, and we want to leverage the customer base. So this acquisition has to meet multiple strategic objectives.”

He might add that western companies are ripe for the picking, as a new breed of heavyweight emerges from the East. Deep in pocket, with cheaper pay scales and market-leading, technological know-how.

But Gopalakrishnan, one of Infosys’s founders, just stirs his tea and smiles. His approach to business, like the Infosys approach to software, is designed with a certain polite logic. Given that his business is now in India’s top 10 by market value and employs 95,000 people, you can believe that logic regularly pays off.

Then, just occasionally, the unexpected happens. Nine days ago Indian rival HCL trumped Infosys’s £407m bid for Axon by offering £441m. On Friday Axon said it was backing HCL. Shares in Infosys, which are listed in Mumbai and New York, slumped.

This weekend Gopalakrishnan and his board will ponder making a higher bid. Their response should be known by Friday, when Infosys announces its half-yearly results. But one way or another, the Indians are coming.

Holding court in an upstairs reception room at London’s Covent Garden Hotel, Gopalakrishnan, 53, seems untroubled by the fuss. Tucking into tea and biscuits, flanked by his banker and a coterie of PR women, he sits a little detached.

He was one of the original seven software engineers who founded Infosys in 1981, and is the third to head it, appointed chief executive last year. Short, affable, grey-haired and moustached, he has the distant air of one who is happier dealing with algorithms than people.

His company, alongside Wipro and Tata Consultancy, is one of India’s big-three tech-support giants. It has built a base sorting out western firms’ software problems, providing the internal links that mesh multinationals together. The growth of this outsourcing work — from call centres to software and systems contracts, taking tasks to where the cheapest solution can be found — underpins globalisation, and is one of the bedrocks of India’s economic success. But so far it has also been dependent on deals with western multinationals.

For Infosys, that is now a problem. Around 97% of its likely $5 billion (£2.8 billion) revenues this year will come from outside India, much of it from America. With an economic slump there inevitable, that needs some adjustment.

Hence Infosys’s desire to own more in Europe. “We’re now consciously growing Europe,” nods Gopalakrishnan. “Today our revenues are 60% America, 30% Europe, 10% rest of the world. We want to take it to 40-40-20.”

British firms like Axon make a good start. Axon specialises in servicing software developed by the German firm SAP and advising clients such as Vodafone and Barclays on implementation.