India centre now ST Micros' largest abroad
By siliconindia staff writer   |   Monday, 24 November 2003, 20:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: Even as the US state of Indiana prefers to keep jobs locally, cancelling an outsourcing contract to TCS, India continues to the most popular tech destination, reports an Indian daily. The India development centre of the $6-billion semiconductor giant, ST MicroElectronics, has now beaten its 16 other design centres, including those in France, Italy and US, to emerge the European company’s largest design centre worldwide, according to Economic Times. And it is still the fastest growing, aiming to increase headcount to 2,000 engineers by next year from 1,350 today. Various departments are virtually racing to move work to India, while people were quite apprehensive of India couple of years ago. Speaking to the daily, STMicroelectronics corporate Vice-President Carmelo Papa said that the India development centre filed around 65 international patents, which he said was demonstrative of the brain power of STMicroelectronics in the country. Further, they are working at the forefront of development in the company, and developing technologies slated to go into production 3-4 years later. How do they handle the backlash? “We have not laid off people in other design centres either,’’ he explains. “The India centre has definitely proved itself. Earlier, team leaders were quite apprehensive of moving work to India, now they are competing with each other to offshore as much of their development jobs to India as possible,’’ he adds. One of the largest semiconductor companies worldwide, ST Microelectronics currently has 1,320 engineers in its India development centre working on chip design and related software development projects. Comparing Indian talent to Chinese, he says even if the engineering talent is on par, the Indians’ command over English gives them an edge. The India centre is doing high-end development work for ST Microelectronics’ global operations and has complete ownership for a number of projects. (Source: Economic Times)

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