By IANS
Bangalore : NEC Electronics, the $5.9-billion Japanese semiconductor conglomerate, has commenced India operations to provide advance design support to its global customers and market its range of products in the Indian subcontinent.
As a liaison office of its Singapore subsidiary, the India centre will offer technical assistance and product information to design houses of its MNC customers operating in India in consumer electronics, automotive and industrial systems.
“With several of our global customers (MNCs) setting up hardware and software development centres in India, we have decided to set up a modest facility in India’s electronics hub Bangalore for facilitating implementation of our devices by local businesses,” NEC Electronics president and CEO Toshio Nakajima told reporters here Wednesday.
“As the fastest-growing semiconductor market in Asia, India offers us a huge opportunity to leverage its talent and resources for helping our global customers in developing new designs and improvise existing devices.”
Though NEC has been present in India over a decade through its distribution network for supplying automotive micro-controllers, power management devices and systems-on-chip (SoC) solutions for digital consumer applications, the new facility will enable the chip major to consolidate its operations and expand its market across verticals.
“Our team of field application engineers will work with our MNC customers and Indian partners to design new products such as embedded DRAM (dynamic random access memory) cells using our electronics’ advances processes.”
“Similarly, we will promote our (all flash) micro-controllers for affordable home appliances, automotive electronics and motorcycles, power management devices for uninterruptible power supply (UPS) battery systems and energy meters and EMMA (electronics miniaturisation for mobile applications) solutions for set-top-boxes,” Toshio said.
NEC Electronics India head Krishnan Neelakantan said the company had set a local sales target of Rs.740 million ($18.7 million) and Rs.3.7 billion ($94 million) in new designs to MNCs operating in India by 2010-11.
“We are also setting up a robust network of third-party sales representatives and hardware and software design firms to increase our market share in India. Revenue from providing design support to MNC customers will be indirect as the billing will be done by our parent company in Japan,” Neelakantan said.
Headquartered in Kawasaki, Japan, semiconductor business NEC Electronics was hived off from NEC Corp in 2002 and went public in July 2003 for listing separately on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It has sales and manufacturing facilities in the Americas, Europe and across Asia, employing about 24,000 people.