New Delhi, Sep 21 (SocialNews.XYZ) India is on track to produce its own global consumer electronics champions, Nothing CEO Carl Pei said on Monday, highlighting the country’s large smartphone market, young population, manufacturing base and growing need for home-grown research and development capabilities.
Pei said countries that have built consumer electronics at scale, including Japan, South Korea and China, eventually produced global brands of their own.
He believes India is now at a similar inflection point, with the country already the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer and home to a large youth population and a deep software talent pool.
According to Pei, the missing piece for India is not manufacturing but the ability to develop and continuously improve products through in-house research and development.
He argued that genuine R&D capability is what separates companies that can sustain growth from those that depend largely on products developed by manufacturing partners.
“India will produce global consumer electronics companies. The only question is when, and that depends on who builds them,” Pei said.
He said Nothing intends to contribute to this process by spinning out its CMF brand into a standalone Indian company. The new entity will be majority Indian-owned and headquartered in India, with its own team and R&D capabilities in the country. Nothing will remain a shareholder and partner in the business.
Pei said his experience of spending eight years in China gave him a first-hand view of how a manufacturing ecosystem can evolve into a global consumer electronics powerhouse.
He said the experience has shaped his belief that India can follow a similar path, provided companies invest in engineering and product development rather than focusing only on assembly.
Reflecting on India’s smartphone market in 2015, Pei said domestic brands at the time accounted for close to half of smartphone sales in the country, with one Indian brand even briefly overtaking Samsung to become the best-selling smartphone brand.
Pei said the next opportunity for Indian brands would therefore depend on their ability to develop products themselves.
“Manufacturing is step one. Step two is R&D,” Pei said, adding that India already has much of the industrial foundation required to take the next step.
Source: IANS
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