The Global Telecom Electronics Manufacturing Service Market is estimated to be USD 165.84 Mn in 2022 and is projected to reach USD 225.3 Mn by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 6.32%.
India is working to expand the domestic manufacturing capacity of its electronics industry and take advantage of key strengths in the information technology (IT) domain and size of the digital market.
The MeitY has undertaken a slew of proactive, pre-emptive, and graded measures to spur the technology-led start-up innovation ecosystem in India, which gives impetus to new and emerging technologies.
In this context here are some comments from industry veterans & experts.
Mr Jagdish Mitra, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Growth, Tech Mahindra
The digital landscape evolved rapidly in 2022, and with Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi launching 5G services, India is poised to lead the new era of digital revolution. Powered by India’s promising growth roadmap, 2023 has the potential to provide the impetus required for India to become digitally ready and to lead technological advancements for the rest of the world to follow. The advancement of existing technologies and the emergence of new trends have reshaped our working patterns and ushered in significant transformations across industries. Artificial intelligence, for example, has become a reality in businesses, and other technologies such as metaverse, blockchain, robotics, and digital twins are expected to follow the suit in the coming years. Furthermore, the adoption of Industry 4.0 has strengthened the supply chain ecosystem, transformed manufacturing, and instilled resilience in enterprise operations. We at Tech Mahindra believe that these tech trends coupled with SAAS as the delivery model will unlock immense potential for businesses in India and help boost the Indian economy like never before and are hence calling them out as our big bets for the future of tech.
I believe in 2023, we will see significant progress in autonomous systems, 5G, and green technology, as well as a quantum leap in technological skilling to digital transformation-related skilling. With digitization sweeping the globe, these emerging technology trends will define the ‘Techade’ and put India on the map as a technology superpower. India has the potential to take the lead in technological innovation, and 2023 will see a continued push toward sustainable progress, supported by newer sustainable technology trends.”
Mr. Avneet Singh Marwah, CEO, Director, Super Plastronics Pvt Ltd, a Kodak HD LED TV’s brand licensee
The government has taken vital steps for Indian manufacturing for the last 3 years. India has now begun to invest in core manufacturing and raw material production. We have seen in the air conditioner industry, where the government has banned the import of CDUs, that a lot of material is coming in for the core raw material; similarly to TV, they made the decision and are establishing their plant.
The government needs a long-term policy; if the policy is long-term, the investors will be very aligned. Second, the government also needs to take quick decisions with investors on how misstatements have started to take place, which is tormenting the economy. Also, the government needs to have a strict policy so that it doesn’t disturb the economy.
Mr. Anku Jain, Managing Director, MediaTek India
During 2022, MediaTek succeeded in delivering on the 5G aspirations of OEMs while also maintaining the 4G/5G mobile volume share leadership with a focus on the mid-level category. Flagship-level smartphones with superior cameras, gaming, and high-end display caught the wide attention. Ground-breaking launches like MediaTek Dimensity 9200 and Dimensity 9000 have brought new benchmark performance for 5G smartphones. MediaTek maintained its leadership in Smart TVs, smart speakers/displays, and Arm Chromebook and emerged as No.1 in the Wi-Fi segment across Retail, Broadband and Consumer Devices.
MediaTek is a leader in Mobile PMIC, Computing & Display and succeeded in developing an exhaustive 5G technology portfolio. We are driven by our vision to deliver incredible technologies to power incredible lives and going forward we will expand our 5G portfolio to 5G Thin Modem, redcap & wearables, automotive telematics and industrial M2M/IoT, and focus on emerging trends like Metaverse, Wi-Fi 7, and power management applications in Computing & Storage of the future.”
Mr Rajiv Bhalla, Managing Director, India & Vice President APAC, at Barco
“In 2022, we navigated the bend to lead the digital transformation and innovation disruption, powered by new-age technologies, and accelerated its amalgamation across operations and workflows. Fueled by India’s promising growth prospects, 2023 is truly going to be a ‘Techade’, given the focus on mega trends such as digitalization, R&D and innovation, local manufacturing, global offshoring, among others. As India is set to lead the G20 agenda in 2023, a lot of focus will be on India’s capabilities to power sustainable economic growth and development and thereby setting a precedence for others to follow.
With the focus moving from technology usage across enterprises to leveraging emerging technologies for a better future, we foresee technologies like AL/ML, cloud computing, 5G, IoT and automation to drive sustainable solutions and new use cases across sectors, industries, governance and citizen services. The global enterprise IT spending estimated to increase significantly in the next year and there is going to be renewed demand for control room solutions, projection technologies and video wall solutions, smart infrastructure, hybrid collation solutions, among others.”
Mr. Agendra Kumar, MD, Esri India
“Technology has indeed been the engine of change worldwide, and India has been the hub of many exciting technological developments in the past year. Customized solutions for solving India-centric problems are the need of the hour. Esri India’s IndoArcGIS which provides GIS-based solutions for a wide range of problems that we face as a country became very popular among our users. Moving ahead, technology trends like the integration of various types of data in GIS systems, data portals to enable easy sharing of data, and Geo-Hubs to create more collaborative working environments and increase community engagement are going to transform the way geospatial technologies are being consumed. Other trends like GeoAI, GIS on Cloud, digital twins, immersive experiences, and advanced spatial analytics will further cater to improved and secure solutions for industries and masses alike. These tech trends will help enterprises boost their speed and agility, reduce complexity and save costs while concurrently enabling unmatched connectivity.”
Nokia India Spokesperson
“2022 has been a landmark year for the telecom sector. Nokia has been greatly encouraged by the pace and efficiency of 5G spectrum allocations in India and the extension of the PLI scheme. We reaffirm our commitment to enable our partners achieve rapid 5G deployment – likely to be one of the fastest rollouts in the world. Major CSPs have announced plans to have a pan-India 5G presence by end of 2023 or early 2024 and we are supporting the implementation of several thousand sites across various circles every week.
In 2023, we hope to see continued Government support in enabling the digital ecosystem to truly tap the benefits of the socio-economic applications of 5G technology. 2023 is also expected to witness wider adoption of private networks by enterprises and businesses for enhanced efficiency and security
Further, we hope to support India’s full and equal participation in the evolution of 6G standards in the next few years as our R&D engineers based here continue to contribute to the collaborative global effort.”
Mr. Arvind Bali, CEO, Telecom Sector Skill Council
2022 was a phenomenal year for the telecom and skilling industries. Both saw significant reforms in both policies and initiatives which have elevated their contribution in nation building. We at Telecom SSC have been closely working with both ministries and secretaries to enhance the aspirations of the youth to work in new fields like 5G, IoT, Drone tech and many more. Shri K Rajaraman (Secretary, DoT) has been personally driving the telecom skilling initiative with monthly review meetings to ensure availability of adequate skilled workforce for the next wave in telecom.
Over the next 3 years, we will be training over 1 lac budding youth in these technologies and many more. We plan to add 10 CoEs and the 1 lac training is being done with DoT oversight. We are going to add 100 new courses to our roster for use cases in both legacy and new technologies. The rollout of 5G will help accelerate advancement in skilling and telecom. We lend our support to the government and industry initiatives to empower the next generation of India.”
Mr. Manoranjan Mohapatra, CEO, Comviva
2022 has been a phenomenal year for all of us at Comviva. Our reinvention as a leading digital technology platform partner and expansion into new western markets like the US and Europe has been extremely encouraging and expected to fuel future growth. We received a very strong response on our new “digital transformation & commerce platform” and “growth marketing” solutions. As we grow, we shall invest more in building differentiated propositions and use cases around Enriched Marketing and Customer Experience, Digital Enterprise & commerce solutions and Embedded Payments solutions. We shall continue our focus on building the next Gen platforms that are AI / ML Powered, Cloud native, SaaS-enabled and API driven.”
Mr. A. Gururaj, Managing Director, Optiemus Electronics
We at Optiemus are constantly working towards contributing to India’s efforts to become a major electronics manufacturing hub globally. 2022 was a major boost for the electronics industry with schemes like PLI and Phased Manufacturing Program pushing indigenous manufacturing in mobile phones, hearables/wearables and other categories. The hearable/wearable industry in India recorded 171% YoY growth in smartwatches, to become the biggest smartwatch market in the world. Optiemus has been at the forefront of this phenomenal journey of the hearable/wearable industry and has partnered with major lifestyle brands like Noise, HARMAN, DIZO, Truke, Wings to manufacture their products from the two existing state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities located in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.
With our efforts in the hearable/wearable segment, we also achieved the successful record production of “One million wearables and hearables” in a month at our manufacturing plants. Under the visionary leadership of our Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi ji, India has made significant progress in electronics manufacturing this year and initiatives like Phased Manufacturing Programme introduced for Hearable/Wearable in the Union Budget 2022 helped immensely to fuel the growth.
Our partner, Wistron is providing active support to create world-class processes in the manufacturing operations and Optiemus is working with leading multinational companies for multiple segments of business to move towards volume production of their products. In 2023, we will diversify our efforts into various segments like IT hardware and telecom equipment manufacturing as well. Also, OEL now has the installed capacity to manufacture 8 lac smartphones in a month and is in the advanced stage of discussions with key global brands.
As the country is witnessing a wider rollout of 5G services, we are actively expanding our capabilities in 5G telecom equipment and have partnered with leading companies to supply 5G products. We also aim to strengthen the IT Hardware segment by expanding laptop manufacturing and starting new categories like mini pc, etc. Adding on to that, we have plans to enter emerging categories like IoT and EV as India adopts new technologies.
On the expansion front furthermore, Optiemus is all set to open its 3rd state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Noida with a capacity for high volume manufacturing of wearables and other products units which will further strengthen our manufacturing capabilities. The electronics industry is set for the next wave of revolution in the coming year and 2023 can be the major milestone year in our aim to make further progress towards realising “Atmanirbhar Bharat” in electronics.”
Mr Gopal Jeyaraj – Head of Sales – SAARC – Promate Technologies
Recently the electronics industry has urged the government to extend the promotion of the manufacturing of electronic components and semiconductors (Specs) scheme by five years with an increased outlay of at least ₹10,000 crore, from ₹3,000 crore at present, in the Union budget for 2023–24.
This is quite a good move as this will help the people and the Indian manufacturers and will help to build the ecosystem. We also plan to provide new opportunities and we see a whole lot of opportunities in the Make in India segment in years to come. There is immense scope and we soon feel that India will be the next manufacturing hub and soon we can sell our Indian products in the Indian market.
Conclusion
The goal is to strengthen the overall tech start-up development infrastructure by overcoming persistent bottlenecks.