Global technology companies such as Samsung Electronics Co, Apple Inc and Sony Corp are poised to see surging sales in India, as the country’s anemic tech manufacturing sector cannot fulfill booming demand for TVs and smartphones.
The world’s fastest-growing market for consumer electronics has few homegrown makers of flat-panel TVs and no producers of mobile phones or the semiconductors and displays used in the devices. Last year, the nation of 1.2 billion people spent US$14.2 billion importing screens and smartphones, accounting for 90 percent of demand, government data show.
India’s technology manufacturers have not kept pace with its software industry, which last year contributed 4.7 percent to the country’s US$1.8 trillion GDP. While the government is trying to support local output with subsidies, only foreign companies have the technology needed to benefit from the incentives, India’s Department of Electronics and Information Technology said.
“India got carried away with the success of software,” India’s Consumer Electronics and Appliances Manufacturers Association secretary-general Suresh Khanna said. “We never developed newer, smarter technologies and largely ignored hardware.”
Assuming India’s economy grows at a 6.5 percent annual rate, the foreigners may be fighting for share of a market totaling 27 million flat-screen TVs by 2017, up from about 7.2 million this year, Khanna said in an interview.
Just a quarter of the TVs sold in India are assembled locally, by companies including Samsung and LG Electronics Inc, and none of the core components are manufactured in the country, Khanna said.
No smartphones are made in India, he said.
“India’s situation reminds me of China 15 years ago,” Gartner Inc research director Roger Sheng said. “It hasn’t taken the necessary steps to develop the technology.”
Chinese companies such as Hisense Electric Co (海信) and Lenovo Group (聯想) have built strong brands that rival the foreigners. Consumers in China bought a combined 365 million smartphones and TVs this year, according to Gartner, about half as many as were made in the country.
Some of the extras were exported to India — bearing the brands of domestic companies such as Micromax Informatics Ltd and Videocon Industries Ltd, Khanna said.
India’s government is offering a 25 percent subsidy on capital costs to set up tech plants. Samsung, LG, Panasonic Corp and Toshiba Corp are planning to take the offer, and the government has also received proposals from Hitachi Ltd, SanDisk Corp and NEC Corp, said J. Satyanarayana, secretary of India’s Department of Electronics and Information Technology.
India plans to approve as much as 250 billion rupees (US$4.5 billion) in foreign investment for facilities to assemble electronics, Satyanarayana said in an interview.
The government has eight proposals worth 10 billion rupees that are close to approval and another 10 proposals for 20 billion rupees in the pipeline, he said.
However, none are from Indian companies.
Without a manufacturing sector in India, “we will lose control of our balance of payments,” Satyanarayana said. “And we’ll lose track of all the foreign equipment in our country, which can be a major security risk.”
The government plans to approve bids to open the country’s first wafer manufacturing factories this month, with production starting next year, Indian Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said last month.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”