India should give more sops for fabrication units: Qualcomm
India should beef up the quantum of its $10 billion financial incentive scheme to attract semiconductor fabrication majors, said Rahul Patel, Qualcomm Technologies’ group general manager for connectivity, broadband and networking.
Patel believes India is competing against developed nations like the US, Europe, Japan, and China, who are offering incentives worth tens of billions of dollars.
“India is competing against developed nations. Companies (fabs) are very capitalistic minded, they’re going to look for the best financial outcome, the size and longevity of the incentives and how competitive they are versus the US, China, Europe, Japan, South Korea,” he said.
“A $10 billion incentive is not the same as $40-50 billion. I'm sure it's not an issue of India not being capable, but it is going to be an issue where the priorities are spent.”
He noted that India did have a geo-political advantage globally as companies were trying to diversify away from China, even as the South Asian nation has a similar policy to other countries on owning semiconductor manufacturing capability. Assembly, testing, marking and packaging or ATMP units were good starting points but getting the semiconductor fabs was critical, Patel said.
“Semiconductors are the new oil,” he said.
Qualcomm, as a fabless chip design firm, was increasing investments in India on an annual basis and had the second largest research and development centre in the world in the country. The senior executive said that Qualcomm was participating in enabling the electronics and manufacturing ecosystem of India as it was a ‘very strategic’ market for the company.
“Qualcomm is building the latest wi-fi elements out of Chennai, modem products out of Bangalore and Hyderabad, designing processing engines, building products that go into IoT markets from India, irrespective of incentives. This size of talent pool is not available outside of India,” he added.
Patel added that Qualcomm had started discussions with Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea for bringing wi-fi 7, the latest standard on wifi technology, even as wi-fi 6 based devices and equipment was just beginning to roll out for deployment into networks. “I will not be surprised in 2025, you will see wi-fi 7 in India,” he said.
The reporter is in Barcelona to cover the Mobile World Congress at the invitation of Xiaomi.