Localised products to drive acceptance: Premji

Wipro Chairman Azim Premji on Monday called upon the Indian semiconductor industry to adapt products to local needs and support the right business model to drive products in the local market. According to him, evolving a product with specific local needs and customer requirements.

Increased localisation of products would lead to greater consumption in the domestic market, meeting the diverse requirements of customers at different price points with varying features.

"For designing products for India, the level of involvement of firms needs to be more. The designers have a tough ask of meeting the targetted costs while ensuring the seamless integration of applications and having the right user interface, preferably localised," he said delivering the keynote address of the India Semiconductor Association (ISA) Vision Summit 2008.

He pointed out that the Indian mobile phone market is poised to touch 450 million in the next 10 years. "This is primarily due to the fact that cellphone vendors and service providers have studied the local market well. There are phones at price points and with features that cater to almost all individual requirements. From high-end PDAs to simple phones for the technophobe. They have even introduced products and services in regional languages," he stated.

Premji was of the opinion that Indian companies should add value to global products instead of trying to evolve a specific product for the country.

He said Indian companies could leverage on their product engineering expertise for growth: "Product engineering is growing at an incredible pace and expanding the expertise areas beyond the telecom and computing domains to automotive, medical devices, industrial electronics and consumer electronics. Indian firms have learnt to leverage the best practices from across the domains they operate."

Over the years, as India developed as an IT hub, the product design centres have been a crucial component of the industry, both in terms of outsourced third party design centres and India development centres of MNCs.

"Both categories have been stepping up their efforts in the recent years. We have seen the overall embedded exports growing at close to 40 per cent CAGR for the past six years. Working across multiple domains, India's name has now become synonymous with offshored product development," Premji said.

The success of the product engineering firms is clearly visible from the fact that India already has about 100,000 engineers contributing to the global electronic engineering team of about 1 million.

"We are already contributing 10 per cent of the global electronic engineering value from our country. While engineering value is 10 per cent, domestic electronic product consumption is about 2.5 per cent (assuming $25 billion in a trillion dollar industry). As we continue to focus on increasing design value to about 25 per cent, we have to get the domestic consumption to more than 10 per cent of global spends in the next decade," Premji said.