Mobile firms expect to generate up to 8,000 jobs in Sriperumbudur this yr

Mobile phone companies expects to achieve peak employment numbers of 33,000 in Sriperumbudur, yesteryears hub for electronics manufacturing in Tamil Nadu, by the end of this year, according to industry body ICA.

The town panchayat near Chennai employed around 33,200 before 2014 when mobile manufacturing unit of Nokia, Motorola, component firm LiteOn etc were operational.

"... by end of this year, we are confident of adding another 7,000-8,000 jobs there. Work in on to bring back LiteOn and also to revive the Motorola plant. Even, if these two plants are not open, still the number of 7,000-8,000 will happen," Indian Cellular Association National President Pankaj Mohindroo said in a letter to telecom minister Manoj Sinha and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

According to the letter, around 25,000 direct-indirect workers were left jobless after Nokia plant was shut down following a Rs 20,000 crore tax dispute.

A total of nine mobile phone and component manufacturing units operated in Sriperumbudur before 2014. These included Nokia with around 14,000 employees, Foxconn (5,700), Salcomp (4,000), Flextronics (3,000), Laird (2,000) , LiteOn (2,300), Wintech (1,500) Jabil (500) and Motorola (200).

While Salcomp and Flextronics continued to operate with reduced strength after the shut down of Nokia plant, others companies closed their operations.

Mohindroo's letter quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi's statement promising revival of Nokia plant for employment generation.

ICA said that there has been significant revival and most of the job losses have been recovered.

The data shared by ICA showed that only three plants - Foxconn, Salcomp and Flextronics employing total of 25,000 employees are operational now.

Foxconn and Salcomp are employing 7,000 people each in their facility while Flextronics has employee strength of 11,000 in the town.