Sasikumar Gendham, Managing Director, Salcomp
There is a very famous quote in Tamil which says, “Shakti illaiyeal Sivan illai.” I represent the Shakti industry, which is the charger industry. And Sivan is the mobile phone. Without the charger, the mobile phone is just a paperweight, I would say “no Lord without his Consort.” And that’s, the business we are in.
90 per cent women in manufacturing since 2007…
And again, from the same quote, we are still Shakti because Shakti represents women. I’m 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, escpecially electronics. 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 market share in India and 15 per cent of the global market for chargers.
Electronics Industry has seen a lot of ups and downs. In 2007, Chennai was supposed to be the next Shenzhen, China when companies like Flextronics, Foxconn, Dell, Sanmina, Salcomp, Nokia… came here. Since then, it has been a roller coaster ride. We have put things back on track.
Thanks to the supportive government policies like PLI schemes, the industry was able to grow today.
Largest exporter of solar micro inverters
We have also taken a step ahead, by not just making chargers but developed as a vendor in the supply chain of precision manufacturing. We have diversified our operations in the last two years. We have become the largest exporter of solar micro inverters in 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
In my view, for factories of future, it’s all about scale. Electronics industry is about scale. We can divide this into three segments. One is OEM manufacture; next comes joint venture for designs and then complete design and development.
Today, especially the mobile phones industry 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 opportunity and Tamil Nadu has all three of these.
Design-lead ecosystem, as far as manufacturing is concerned, is definitely flourishing here with a lot of companies investing in design and development.
