Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Wednesday, Feb 08, 2006
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Wednesday, Feb 08, 2006 |
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Info-Tech
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Hardware SanDisk Corp sets up R&D centre Our Bureau
Mr Yoram Cedar, Executive Vice-President of Handset Business and Corporation Engineering, SanDisk Corporation, (right) and Mr Sanjay Mehrotra, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice-President, in Bangalore on Tuesday. — G.R.N. Somashekar
Bangalore Feb. 7 FLASH memory card maker SanDisk Corporation has expanded its research and development team to India. The company also announced its foray into the Indian consumer electronics space with digital audio players and removable flash storage cards for mobiles. Worldwide flash storage card market will grow to $36 billion in revenues by 2008, according to industry analysts. The company's strategy is to identify mass consumer markets for flash storage and manufacture high volumes of storage related products. Five markets — digital still camera, flash audio players, gaming consoles, USB drives and phone slots - have been targeted. "The Indian market is currently small, around a few million dollars," said Mr Sanjay Mehrotra, COO and Co-founder, SanDisk. He hoped the demand would increase as mobile phone sales and digicam sales increased. "It could increase to 2-4 per cent of our worldwide revenue sales," he said. The company will invest in growing sales effort this year for consumer electronics products. SanDisk's products include Sansa range of MP3 players, the latest being e200, which comes in 2GB, 4GB and 6GB capacities and is priced from $199 to $299. SanDisk currently ranks second after Apple in the digital audio player market in the US. In December 2005, Sandisk had 10-13 per cent of the market share (in revenues), while Apple Computer (maker of the iPods) ruled supreme with 65 per cent. Other products include Cruzer range of USB flash drives (also called pen drives); CompactFlash and MultiMedia cards for digicams; and Secure Digital and miniSD cards for cell phones. The $2.31-billion company has four research facilities in the US, Israel, Japan and Scotland with more than 400 engineers focused on second-generation flash storage. SanDisk has hired 10 engineers for the Device Design Centre here, and would grow to a 40-50 person team in a year, said Mr Mehrotra. The company currently has two non-captive design facilities in India - Wipro and RelQ. Wipro offers design engineering while RelQ offers testing for SanDisk products. The centre will initially concentrate on projects involving NAND memory, said Mr Mehrotra. Later, the team will work on ASIC controllers, he added.
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