January - 2009 issue > Business

By Biswadip (Bobby) Mitra

India is an emerging market today and is moving towards evolving as an emerged economy in a few years. This presents a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity for all of us to take part in this transition and making it happen.

Technology has a key role in driving this transition. The electronics industry in particular, is different in India from the western world in its characteristics and the companies that are involved in it. What’s different about India? Who are the players here? Like in the West, we also have large companies, but there is another aspect that is unique. We have nearly 2,000 small to medium-sized electronics companies in the country engaged in world class design and manufacturing. Several of these are names that many will not even recognize.

This led me to the realization that perhaps the 80:20 rule didn’t apply to India. If any semiconductor company has to gain market share in India, it not only has to look at the 4 or 5 large electronics OEMs, but also take into consideration the business that can be generated from these 2,000 or more small companies. Those who want to participate in this transformation of India from an emerging to an emerged economy must work with this cross-section of large to small/medium sized companies.

Let me illustrate this by taking the example of LED lighting companies in Western India alone. There are at least 50 LED lighting companies designing innovative solutions for street lighting, large displays, etc. These companies consume a lot of semiconductors. The situation is similar in other areas of industrial, automotive, telecom infrastructure, medical etc.

It’s just not the size, but the characteristics are also diverse. Let’s take medical electronics, for instance. We worked with a medical OEM in India and came up with a solution that integrated many of the analog and digital functions onto a single chip. This was driven by the OEM’s vision to take healthcare to the masses by bringing down the cost of a scan to one-tenth the cost that was being incurred earlier.

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