Sasikumar Gendham, Managing Director, Salcomp highlights the main elements that make factories of the future at the Turbocharged Tamil Nadu seminar organised by Industrial Economist.
There is a very famous quote in Tamil which says, “Shakti illaiyeal Sivan, illai.” So I represent the Shakti industry, which is the charger industry. And Sivan is basically the mobile phone. Without the charger, the mobile phone is just a paperweight, I would say. From that point, you know, I think charges are more important. And that’s, the business we are in.
90 per cent women in electronics manufacturing since 2007…
And again, from the same quote, we are still Shakti because Shakti represents women. I’m very proud to say this, we have been the one to bring 90 per cent women in the electronics manufacturing industry way back in 2007. And I think there is no other state apart from Tamil Nadu, which has this kind of a gender diversity in the area of manufacturing, esc electronics manufacturing. It’s been a phenomenal journey for us since then. Salcomp is number one charger supplier, both globally and in India. Salcomp has about 30 per cent of India’s market share and 15 per cent of the global market share in this space.
Electronics Industry has seen a lot of ups and downs. In 2007, Chennai was supposed to be the next Schengen, China when companies like Flextronics, Foxconn, Dell, Sanmina, Salcomp, Nokia came here. Since then it has been a roller coaster ride, but I think we have put things back on track. Thanks to the supportive government policies like PLI schemes and spec schemes, the industry was able to grow. Electronics today is a part of our daily life, starting from alarm bells in the morning, till one goes to bed, everything is driven more or less by electronics. So, we play a very key role in powering of all these devices.
Largest exporter of solar micro inverters
We have also taken a step ahead, by not just making chargers but developed to a vendor in the supply chain of precision manufacturing. We have completely diversified our operations in the last two years. We have become the largest exporter of solar micro inverters out of whole out of India. Every week, at least one Boeing aircraft worth of goods are exported out from Chennai, all the way to San Francisco.
Need to move towards high-value addition
So in my view, for factories of future it’s all about scale. Electronics industry is about scale. And we can divide this into three segments. One is the OEM manufacturing, next comes the joint venture designs and then a complete design and development. Today, especially mobile phones manufacturing industry here has moved from assembly operations to component manufacturing. I think that’s the very first step, but where we can really go is, towards high value addition like design. This will allow us to have a complete ecosystem starting from design to component manufacturing and assembly. I think this is a very clear business case and Tamil Nadu has all three of this.
The design lead ecosystem, as far as manufacturing is concerned is definitely flourishing with a lot of companies, investing in design and development.
Watch the entire video of Sasikumar Gendham speak at the session here.
