Bangalore: Is Indian software industry fast losing its low-cost destination advantage? So it may seem. According to the 2009 EE Times Global Salary and Opinion Survey, Engineers' salaries in India and China have risen at a pace faster than that in Japan, North America, and some of their European counterparts. Almost 40 percent of the respondents in India have seen their salaries grow much or slightly higher than what they were five years ago, while only 34 percent of respondents in Europe and 25 percent of that in North America reported a hike during the same time. The study says that competition for engineering talent in India and its emerging rival China has got tougher in the last ten years as hardware and software companies have accelerated the transfer of manufacturing and design operations from Western locations to lower-cost parts of the globe. This growing competition, often makes companies offer attractive incentives to hire experienced engineers, only to lose them to rivals after a couple of years. However, though IT employees in both China and India have seen better raises over the last few years than their counterparts in the developed world, majority of the techies in the two countries still earn considerably less than their counterparts elsewhere, the study adds.