The Hindu Business Line : NXP to help operators cut down on middlemen, process brands

Bangalore, Feb. 21 NXP Semiconductors India Pvt Ltd, which does semiconductor software and design work from India, has hit upon a novel idea to get business. It intends to interface between Indian telecom service providers with Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers. This will help Indian telecom companies cut costs of their services and in the process NXP will get business from the manufacturers.

Process method

This is how it works. According to Mr Rajeev Mehtani, Vice President and Managing Director, NXP Semiconductors, customers of Indian telecom service providers such as Bharti and Reliance, demand ultra-low cost and yet feature-rich equipment such as handsets and set top boxes.

These products come from companies like Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Most of these companies, except Nokia and the Korean companies, have the products made by manufacturers in China and Taiwan.

Indian telecom companies could save their customers a lot by producing the devices directly from the Chinese and Taiwanese. “Today, (telecom) operators want to cut down the middlemen and bring in their own brands,” Mr Mehtani said. NXP intends to facilitate this process with an eye on the design work that could come along with it.

Hiring not priority

In India (Bangalore), NXP has about 900 people working for it. They do design and software work for semiconductors that would to into products like TVs, set top boxes, and cell phones. NXP is working on chips that would put more features into these products at a low cost, such as radio frequency in mobile handsets.

“Ten years back, a cell phone had 200 components. Today it has 28,” Mr Mehtani said, pointing out that a lot of functions have got merged into fewer devices. That is the integration work, which NXP is doing here.

“We do a lot of top-end work here,” he said, adding that work on semiconductor design for devices based on 4G technology was among them.

Would NXP raise its headcount in India? Negative. “The value proposition is no longer hiring more people,” says Mr Mehtani, “but moving up the value chain.” The company wants to take more of global responsibilities of its parent company in The Netherlands.

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