MUMBAI: Over two decades ago, semiconductor company Texas Instruments (TI) triggered the offshoring wave and the growth of Bangalore as the Silicon
Valley of India when it set up a development centre.
The company is now taking another bet on India — this time on the potential of the country’s booming market for technology products and services. Since 2007, it has set up around 14 offices in the country, including some in small cities like Nashik, Chandigarh and Coimbatore.
“Customers do appreciate local support,” said Arun Jain, director — sales and marketing, TI India, by way of explanation. In Bangalore itself, TI has three offices, where typically a US city would have just had one. According to the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA) and Frost & Sullivan, the overall semiconductor market in India is rising steadily. From $ 2.53 billion in 2008, it is expected to rise to $3.24 billion in 2010, growing at a CAGR of 13.1%.
“The interesting story is what will unfold over the next 10 years in terms of new applications for the semi-urban and rural markets,” said Jaswinder Ahuja, member of the executive council of ISA and managing director, Cadence India. Cadence supplies software for chips that companies like TI and its rival, Freescale Semiconductor, manufacture.
TI itself does not break up country-specific revenues but Nash Robotics, one of TI’s customers in Nashik, said it alone has a requirement of around 2,000 controllers (the electronic component that uses chips) annually, each costing Rs 60,000 — Rs 1.20 lakh.
Nash, a provider of turnkey solutions to the automotive industry, manufactures equipment that is used for welding the body of a car. It has grown in tandem with the increasing number of auto majors coming to India. Bharath Kewalramani, MD, Nash, said thanks to TI moving to Nashik, the firm has been able to reduce its development time for controllers from three months to just two weeks.
“Earlier, we had to travel to US or Bangalore. It wasted a lot of time. Now we get home-delivered service — TI engineers visit us almost every week,” said Mr Kewalramani. Engineers at Nash, who earlier pored over 40-100 pages of data that accompanies every chip, now speak face-to-face with TI engineers and figure out the most appropriate chips to use in a new circuit board. Nash mostly sources from TI. It has also promised to partner with it on any new development. “It’s a myth that hi-tech is only for hi-tech applications. We are working with several customers to devise new solutions for a number of industry segments,” said Mr Jain.
India as a market has been growing in the past 4-5 years, said Ganesh Guruswamy, country manager, Freescale Semiconductor India. Freescale, which competes with TI, was earlier part of Motorola. It followed TI into Bangalore setting up a development centre in 1997-98. “Earlier our customer was mostly government. Now it is significantly different,” points out Mr Guruswamy.
And certainly, market has come a long way since Motorala first set up its sales office in India in 1991-92, and when a bulk of its business was pager sales.
