The Hindu Business Line : eInfochips gears up for Japanese biz

ENGINEERS at the design centres of the Ahmedabad-based AISC design services and embedded systems solutions provider, eInfochips, have more to do these days than their core job profiles and if they seem to speak in a language that sound strange to their colleagues, they may be forgiven.

Ten of them at Ahmedabad and half-a-dozen at the Pune design centre, are preparing for the company's foray into the Japanese market, the first step being, of course, learning Japanese.

"As Japanese electronics majors who have traditionally been doing the entire process of conceptualising, designing and manufacturing their products find their margins coming under pressure, they are looking towards India for chip and systems designing services and we intend to tap this window of opportunity,'' says Mr Tapan Joshi, Vice-President, Marketing.

The company is gearing up to launch a subsidiary in Japan four months from now "We are currently working with sales partners there, but will place our applications engineers in the market since ours is a support-intensive space,'' Mr Joshi added.

The company, which started testing the Japanese markets six months ago, has bagged its first contract, to design a chip for an automotive infotainment system from a Japanese company.

"Beginning April, the Japanese business will contribute 6-7 per cent of our revenues. But the real growth in Japanese revenues will come five to six years from now when business from the US markets will have begun tapering off, but work will start pouring in from Japan,'' he said.

Design centre for Qlogic: The company is also currently operating a design centre for the $600-million Qlogic for which it has a multi-year contract for research and development.