A man with 84 patents is someone to take serious note of. Qualcomm India president Avneesh Agrawal makes heads turn in technology circles by the sheer weight of achievements and the company is gaining hugely under his leadership. Agrawal has been with Qualcomm since 1994, but made his name within the company when he led the development of its first universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) chip set. From there he went from strength to strength and led its R&D division for a year before turning his eyes on India.
During one of his visits to the India facility, it struck him that India as a market was going to explode. With 3G adoption picking up pace, it dawned on him that the country was going to be at least the third largest market after US and China. He decided to stay back. ?Engineering teams here are very mature, so we could do world-class, cutting edge stuff from here that would be at the forefront of technology,? says Agrawal.
The Qualcomm management told him to grow the India business, especially help India make the transition from 2G to 3G. ?Qualcomm plays in 3G and 4G?both CDMA and WCDMA technologies. So the charter was to help India make this transition from 2G to 3G and work with the operators and ecosystem and thereby grow Qualcomm?s share in it. The second charter was to take the engineering organisation to the next level by giving them stronger design capabilities.?
Agrawal excelled himself on both counts and no one was surprised. ?The optimism, excitement and aspiration of the younger generation here gave me confidence that things will happen and that the changes will be far reaching and for good,? he notes.
One of the joys of being a technologist is to be confronted with difficult challenges and then being able to find a way out of trouble. Agrawal has enjoyed battling many such events. One such instance was when he took on the 4G initiative in 1999-2000. ?At that point there were no smart phones; so talking about 50 megabytes per second was premature. A lot of soul searching was happening and a business rationale for 4G was difficult to propose. Qualcomm was really successful in 3G, so changing the paradigm seemed tough at that time,? says Agrawal.
The challenge was that there was hardly any data on phones at that time. ?While technically, it was very exciting, the business imperatives were different. There were doubts whether consumers will really demand this kind of experience on phones. There were skeptics and sometimes I too would question myself after having convinced them on the proposition. As it turned out, we lucked out and made the right call for both Qualcomm, as well as the industry,? he says.
Going after the BWA spectrum was his biggest bet. ?When BWA auctions were taking place?there was a lot of hype on WIMAX ?spectrum?. We had done a lot of research and knew that it wasn?t going to work as it was the wrong technology largely because the ecosystem did not exist,? explains Agrawal.
Qualcomm believed that the long term evolution (LTE) was the right technology transition for the industry and as technology innovators, placed its bets there. ?In India, we told operators about deploying LTE but since there was no open acceptance, we went a step further and said that we will invest in a spectrum to ensure LTE gets deployed. That statement made a lot of impact and operators announced their LTE plans.?
?Our main objective in getting the BWA spectrum, was to see that the right technology (for the country & for the company) is made available. By last year, it was fairly obvious that Bharti, Reliance, Aircel was going LTE and we had to make sure that the spectrum gets utilised. We had always publicly stated our intention to work along with an operator to deploy the right technology?so this deal was really a closure of that vision?to make sure that LTE gets deployed and to partner with the right operator.?
Now that he has laid the foundation, Agrawal wants Qualcomm India to go to the next level. ?I would term it as ?realisation of the promise??almost like a consolidation. At our headquarters in San Diego, while people?s eyes light up for India, there are questions on ?by when would we see those really large numbers?? There is a huge expectation from India and we have to deliver on that in the next three years?we have to make the vision of 3G-4G a reality. That will be the biggest focus?once we cross 100 million 3G smart phone sales, we?ll define the next frontier,? he promises.
The slow growth of the Indian tablet market does not seem to worry him. ?One of the challenges has been the price sensitive market. India is not a rich country and even if there is money?Indians are price conscious. Tablet pricing hasn?t reached that point?what you are seeing right now is Wifi tablets coming in because price points have reached below 100 dollars. Wifi penetration in India is really low. What we need to do is to go to cellular broadband. We are working with manufacturers/ ecosystem including Indian companies to make 3G tablets available at affordable price points so that it goes from being niche to masses. Sometime around 2013-14, we should see interesting volumes.?
