India’s Hardware Prospects

Hardware System design or manufacturing has never been India’s sweet-spot. However, as the country becomes a major consumer of electronics systems, especially computers, consumer electronics and cellular handsets, it makes more and more sense to do more hardware design and manufacturing locally. EETimes reports on a couple of acquisitions:

PCB manufacturer Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik (AT&S) has acquired Bangalore-based ECAD Technologies Pvt. Ltd., which performs design, simulation and testing of high-end PCBs. AT&S had some years ago acquired a PCB manufacturing plant in Nanjangud, near Bangalore. Celestica has acquired Ramnish Elecronics Pvt. Ltd. (Hyderabad, India), which provides design, PCB assembly and system assembly to Indian and overseas markets.

The opportunity that these acquisitions allude to, I believe, is an opportunity for localization of systems to suit the needs of the local market. These needs include extreme price-point pressure, which compels the manufacturer to cut out the big overseas shipping and handling costs. But much more importantly, where I see the opportunity is in understanding the local customers’ functionality needs, both hardware and software.

Small merchants like fishermen and farmers may have much greater email / web / GPS communication needs than PDA calendar needs, and hence a Smart Phone spec for such a segment is quite different from the Smart Phones that sell in the Western world.

One skill gap that exists in India, however, is good product marketing. India has grown up to become an IT world power based entirely on its services business. Hence, product marketeers have not had any opportunity to get trained there. So these hardware vendors would do well to combine the systems capabilities with a tad of product marketing expertise.