TN tops in electronic exports with $7.37 billion

CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu is the number one State in electronics exports touching over $7.37 billion compared to $5.7 billion last year, said Vishnu Venugopal, MD, Guidance Tamil Nadu.

Hailing the unprecedented trend after having excelled in assembly and general manufacturing, he said all efforts are being made to be focused on tapping the opportunities. In his keynote address at the conference on automotive R&D trends with the theme ‘Charging the Future of Mobility’, organised by the TN Technology Development & Promotion Centre of CII, he said “we now need to up our game in component manufacturing by moving up the value chain. Our recently introduced Advanced Electronics and Semiconductor policy, launched during the Global Investment Meet here has also evinced a lot of interest. We are pursuing three broad pillars under which we try to focus on attracting investments. The first is attracting companies keen to invest in India for the first time. The second is to invite companies that have already invested in India but are not present in TN and the third is targeting companies who have already invested in TN to reinvest more in the State rather than look at other States”. “The investment and the direction that automotive companies have towards R&D is something that needs to happen quickly. We should take advantage of this limited opportunity. If we can act in the next ten years, we can bridge a lot of gaps that exist between us and the developed countries in terms of automotive technology for our market. The difficulty for vehicle manufacturers is there are a lot of evolving technologies taking place. EV is going to happen, but to what extent remains to be seen. Technologies are still evolving and one cannot bet everything on one particular power source. This is a significant challenge that I see for R&D companies,” said Srivats Ram, vice chairman, CII-Tamil Nadu State Council & MD, Wheels India, in his special address.