India as a global hub: An MNC's viewpoint
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 06 October 2010, 00:03 IST   |    2 Comments
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India as a global hub: An MNC's viewpoint
Bangalore: What does a multinational company long for, when it wants to invest for the expansion of its business? Cost factor, competent manpower, liberalized government regulations pertaining to foreign investments and other factors which can assure a good return on investment. Probably these were the reasons that lured SanDisk to India from where they can manage their global operations. "Apart from the skilled manpower, the market dynamics is one such reason which makes India a lucrative destination for the company. It has been estimated that, the domestic cell phone market will grow tremendously, out of which most of the cell phones will be facilitated with slots for memory cards," said Ravi Naik, Vice President-IT at SanDisk. Seeing the rapid growth of mobile internet in India, SanDisk expects the demand for smartphones and tablet PCs will grow after the advent of 3G in India. For all these products, flash memory is an integral part and the company feels that this is the right time to come to India. During the time when companies wanted to equip their infrastructure with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), SanDisk desired to implement all the modules of SAP. The task seemed to be quite challenging for the flash card manufacturer but the company decided to go for complete implementation of all modules of their ERP. Crediting the contribution of Satyam, who partnered with SanDisk for a successful ERP implementation, SanDisk feels it makes logical sense for the company to manage its global operations from India. The discrepancy in time zone is another reason which brings MNCs to India as the companies can balance their global operations from their units established here. The MNCs came to India to cash on this opportunity but slowly they started realizing that the resources in India have everything necessary to manage their operations worldwide. Over the years, MNCs have been assured that the resources employed by them in India will reimburse them more than what they had invested. The company is looking at avenues which can augment their lean team in the U.S. As per the success of their projects, they would further plan to grow their business in Bangalore. Currently, SanDisk will work on a multivendor strategy where they will hire few people under them, who would be responsible to scrutinize the overall operations carried out by different vendors including Satyam. There are 35 people looking after the maintenance of their captive sites in India and by 2011, the company will increase its headcount to about 90 employees. According to Naik, SanDisk's partners in India understand the finance functions and the behavior of business operations and that makes India a preferable destination for managing their global operations.

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