‘Fabs will lead to a sea change in tech arena’

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Deepak Puri, MD of Moser Baer, is an IT industry leader who speaks with authority on technology manufacturing. The past couple of decades that have seen phenomenal changes in the high-tech scenario, was the time during which Puri steered Moser Baer to be the world’s No 2 maker of optical storage media—CDs and DVDs. Now, Puri is leading the company into new ventures like photovoltaics, digital entertainment and solid-state media (pen drives). Moser Baer has not just survived, but grown at a time when India was focused on software development, losing out to China in manufacturing. Puri talks to FE’s Sanjay Anand on a range of technology issues. Excerpts:

You were an early entrant into the technology manufacturing area, but India, overall, hasn’t taken that kind of lead…

You climb the ladder one rung at a time. You start at the lower rung and go up. Unfortunately, in India, there were very few players in the tech manufacturing area. Usually, it always starts with assembling. Then you get into making one of the components, or you put together a thing like television. All that has gone because we were never competitive or had volumes of scale. For example, China today boasts of being the world’s largest TV producer, the largest LCD producer and so on. Same with phones….Forty years ago, they were just assembling lowest rung things like transistor radios or calculators. Over a period of time, China learnt about things like components and how to manufacture. So they progressed from rung to rung. Now, they make the world’s most high-tech items.

Where did India miss out?

Unfortunately, although our government was aware of it—technology manufacturing trends in Asia, especially in China—they never foresaw the impact and never encouraged a similar thing in India. And then, although I am for open market… but when India reduced tariffs and opened the market to competition, manufacturers here, whether it was their fault or not, were not prepared enough to face the onslaught. So, people found it easier to import things and put their labels on them.

There is a big debate on chip manufacturing in India nowadays. What is your take on it?