Make in India to Push Indian T&M Market
—Sudhir Tangri Country General Manager, Keysight Technologies India
Voice&Data: What type of trends are you noticing in the Indian T&M market today?
Sudhir Tangri: The Indian market is going through a transformational phase right now. Just a year back, we had close to zero mobile handsets manufacturing being done out of the country and now it is a total brand new market for us after the Modi government introduced new policies for manufacturing. So, we can say that this is a market which is budding and seeing investment and which will grow because this market was non-existent and anything coming out of this market is all new.
We see a lot of business coming in as manufacturing add to numbers and as these people expand their lines and put more handsets manufacturing lines, more will be the need for tests and measurements.
Voice&Data: What are some of your key products that would give fillip to the T&M market?
Sudhir Tangri: We have a couple of new products which we launched in the recent past. All these products are primarily aiming at the wireless and digital domain. We have launched four new products of late, which help chipset vendors do a thorough user equipment data throughput kind of tests, protocol test, and functional test and stuff like that. Then there is a product aimed at the manufacturing market it ensures that you have multiple multiformat devices being tested simultaneously because for production throughput is very important and testing right is very important.
All these products give them the complete leverage to test right. Testing more than what is required and testing less than what is required is something we would probably never want our customers to face. So, we have products to help them test right.
Coming to digital side, people are working on high speed digital design buses and technology buses like Pam-4, which is a new digital technology and that requires the infrastructure equipment and we have a product to test those buses and that is called AWG.
Voice&Data: What type of expectations you have from these products?
Sudhir Tangri: The expectation is to see a good penetration and acceptance in the market and fortunately for us, the manufacturing market is a budding new market.
So, the manufacturing products are already seeing some good traction. The other products— UXM, R&D product or the chipset test product have come up with newer versions, which will help to take the products’ capabilities to the next higher level.
So, we will take the capability to LTE to LTE advanced level and beyond that so we see some good acceptance of these new products in the market in India.
Voice&Data: Tell us something about your strategies for reaching out to customers...
Sudhir Tangri: We have a hybrid model, a direct sale model and we have a partner model. Now, the way going a little deeper is there are certain products, which we categorize as distribution-preferred products and so, those products are sold through partners and the nondistribution products are sold directly by us in the market.
We have total 10 partners in India and one each in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. They are sales partners who want us to penetrate in large geographies here in India.
Voice&Data: Any plans to expand the number of partners?
Sudhir Tangri: Actually, the distribution preferred products are the low-end products which need a much wider coverage. We continue to expand the channel network whenever we feel. We believe that there are certain markets which are not served properly or not covered then we kind of make adjustments.
So that’s a very continuous ongoing process. Coming specifically to India, whether we are talking about aerospace defence or fables device manufacturing, the kind of products actually going into these markets are mostly non-distribution preferred so that means we are serving these markets directly.
Voice&Data: Do you have any plans to manufacture in India, keeping in mind the ‘Make in India’ program of the government?
Sudhir Tangri: In the near future, we don’t have a plan to set up a manufacturing plant in India. About 80-85% of our products are being manufactured in our factory in Malaysia and the way we look at that is that right now the capacity of the plant is good enough and we don’t need to scale up the capacity anywhere else globally.
There are two major things when we look at ‘Make in India’: one is device manufacturing, which is happening here, primarily smartphones because the market is trending very heavily towards smartphones.
So, when the stakeholders are manufacturing in India, they will be requiring products to test their devices and this is where Keysight will play a role and we are working with organizations which are manufacturing phones or planning to manufacture phones in India and we serve them with products such as UXM and EXM, which help them to solve their testing problems.
Secondly, we also expect the aerospace defence to yield fruits for us as earlier only PSUs were involved in defence manufacturing but now the private sector is also engaged in manufacturing such products.
Voice&Data: Which would be your key focus areas in the near future?
Sudhir Tangri: Lately, we acquired Anite, which has a lot of solutions in wireless, and we believe things will start unfolding with this acquisition and we will be able to offer more to the telcos. Currently, we are working with telcos primarily for their labs –carrier aggregation etc.
Besides, we are very aggressively pursuing initiatives such as ‘Make in India’ which will help us to grow at a faster rate than the industry numbers. We have a global R&D here and lot of software goes into our products. Products are developed here in Manesar, more of software, less of hardware.
In addition, the focus will be to grow in very specific technology such as 5G and since we have to grow in those technologies, we have to anyhow work around such technologies.
We have a product aimed at the manufacturing market. It ensures that you have multiple multiformat devices being tested simultaneously because for production, throughput is very important and testing right is very important.