Financial Chronicle
Semiconductor major Texas Instruments India (TI) is betting big on emerging business areas such as home automation, wireless technologies and domestic low-cost medical equipment manufacturing. Though the global semiconductor market is expected to shrink by about 5 percent, the Asia Pacific region including
The Indian semiconductor market was worth about $2.4 billion in 2008 and it is expected to grow by at least 13 percent this year, said Srinivas Kasa, general manager, South, sales and marketing, Texas Instruments India. However, Kasa refused to reveal financial details and expectations of the company for the year in
Emerging growth areas including light-emitting diode (LED) lighting devices, liquid crystal display (LCD) televisions and video surveillance will help in propelling the company’s growth in the country, he added. TI markets more than 50,000 semiconductor products catering to several business verticals such as automobiles, energy, telecom, industrial applications and medicine.
“Although our research and development centre is present in
HP REJIGS MKT PLANS ALONG MICRO LINES
Writankar Mukherjee, Kolkata
The Economic Times (
Hewlett-Packard (HP),
This is a significant shift in HP’s go-to-market strategy because till now the company had segmented the Indian market into consumer, enterprise, SMBs, government and education.
HP TARGETS PUBLISHING, PHARMA INDUSTRY IN
Mumbai/Ahmedabad
Business Standard
The imaging and printing division of Hewlett-Packard India (HP) will be focusing on pharma and publishing industry in
“We will look at bigger opportunities in markets like pharma and publishing for our digital printing business. Around 80 percent of pharma revenues comes from
Therefore, it is being looked from a strategic perspective as far as the digital printing business in Gujarat is concerned,” said Puneet Chadha, director - graphic solutions business, imaging and printing group, Hewlett-Packard India
The company has already strengthened its position in the digital printing space by launching its Indigo Digital Offset Press in Gujarat. For this, HP has tied up with Gandhinagar-based Printwell Offset, an end-to-end digital offset printing solutions provider.
“The Indigo Digital Offset Press will offer a range of unique offerings for home consumers as well as businesses that address the latent gaps in the conventional analogue-based printing industry,” Chadha added.
According to Chadha, typically, an Indigo Digital Offset Press installation costs around Rs 3 crore.
INTEL RIDES ON ATOM TO TARGET NET-CONNECTED DEVICES MARKET
Chennai
The Hindu Business Line
Change your profile on Facebook, watch a video clip that your daughter recommends and edit your resume; all on your mobile while retaining the experience you had doing all these on your PC. The Atom, Intel’s newest microprocessor, would help replicate the PC’s ease of use on the mobile, said Navin Shenoy, Intel’s Vice-President and General Manager, Asia-Pacific. He was addressing reporters from The Hindu Group of publications.
Shenoy said the Atom, which was launched last year, would help Intel target three new markets: the smart phone market; the consumer electronics market (such as set top boxes having the Atom processor); and the embedded systems market, which would include ATMs and digital surveillance systems.
Showcasing a couple of products under Intel’s Project Blue, Shenoy said the Atom helped address affordability issues in PCs. He said fully functional computer with the Atom chip (and with Internet access through WiMax technology) would be available as soon as WiMax networks are up in India; as also a Net-top computer that addressed the entry level market with prices in the Rs 10,000-12,000 range, without in-built Net connectivity capability.
According to him, Internet sites are typically built on the X86 architecture and the Atom, built using that architecture, helps replicate the PC experience on mobile Internet devices.
Asked if Intel has not already missed the mobile phone revolution, Shenoy said, “We came into the market five years ago but we brought nothing unique to the voice market. But now, with the Atom, we are able to uniquely address the Net-connected devices market.”
He also clarified that Intel had recently rationalised its worldwide capacity and had no plans to invest in new factories in
Commenting on the cyclicality of the semiconductor industry, Shenoy said, “We tend to see the downturn six months early. Likewise for the revival.”
He added that the last two to three months had been stable.
Mumbai
The Financial Express
Gartner’s recent survey predicts that the Indian PC market will be flat in 2009, witnessing a decline of 0.8% from 2008, which is an upward revision from its earlier projection made in February 2009 of 3.7% decline.
According to sources, India PC market shipments was flat in CY 2008 at 7.98 million units. Gartner predicts, a worldwide PC shipment is likely to reach 274 million units in 2009, a 6% decline from 2008 shipments of 292 million.
Gartner now expects the PC market to post positive growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, setting the stage for a healthy market recovery in 2010 with units forecast to grow 10.3%.
Gartner’s latest forecast is more positive than its preliminary forecast from mid-May, which anticipated a 6.6% unit decline in 2009, and considerably stronger than its last detailed forecast from March, which projected a 9.2% unit decline.
However, analysts are still wary to say that the worst is over and the market is recovering.
“PC unit growth was stronger than we expected in all markets but
“However, professional shipments continued to struggle,” he added.
The rate of decline in PC sales globally has been slowed due to the continuing popularity of mini-notebooks, with units on target to reach 21 million this year and 30 million in 2010, said Gartner.
Mobile-PC shipments are set to reach 149 million units in 2009, a 4.1% increase from 2008, but spending on mobile PCs is expected to decline 12.8% as mobile-PC average selling prices continue to drop at an unprecedented rate, the analyst firm added.
“However, mini-notebook units posted their first quarter-over-quarter decline in the first quarter of 2009,” said Shiffler.
Gartner analysts said the impact of Windows 7’s release in October on the PC market is likely to be very modest.
“Although the buzz surrounding Windows 7 has generally been quite positive, we don’t expect the market to significantly deviate from its normal seasonal trends in reaction to its release,” said Shiffler.
INFY'S LOSS, CHIP MAKERS GAIN
C Chitti Pantulu.
DNA (
The baton holders of the semiconductor industry have a reason to smile. After the appointment of Nandan Nilekani as the first chairman of the nascent National Unique Identification Authority of India (UID), the industry will get a fillip from smart cards.
According to industry estimates, the UID project could cost anywhere between Rs 10,000-15,000 crore over the next 4-6 years. The heart of the smart card is the embedded chip, which is supplied by a handful of companies in the country.
"The national ID card initiative and its anticipated implementation is expected to propel the market for smart cards in
Semiconductor Association (ISA). The ISA had estimated the smart card market in
The technology itself is not new. But the complexity arises with the amount of data to be written on to it, explained Ashok Chandok, senior director, global sales and marketing at NXP Semiconductors, which supplies these chips to more than 80 countries. NXP supplied the chips for an earlier pilot project for a smart card-based citizenship identity programme that was carried out in 13 districts across 9 states in 2007.
Each card could cost anywhere between Rs 20-150 each depending up on how much data and security is to be written on it, Chandok added. He explained that each card would have a micro computer built in and could hold between 32KB and 64KB data enough to save 10 fingerprints, one photograph and several more data fields.
Such cards are already being used by the Delhi Metro and the Bangalore Metropolitan
Transportation Corporation (BMTC) for fare collection, apart from a host of road transport authorities.
But given that close to a billion people will have to be covered under the UID project for which the government had allocated Rs 100 crore in the interim budget, it opens up a huge potential for smart card makers.
However, whether this will be enough incentive for semiconductor companies to set up fabs in
"But the growth of smart cards will have a direct bearing on the anticipated surge in the market for application specific standard products (ASSP), cards during the forecast period," observed ISA's Shenoy.
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