Chip-maker AMD is getting extremely bullish on India as it sees the country compensating for the decline in PC market globally. In an exclusive interview with BusinessLine , AMD President and CEO Lisa Su said India is strategic to the company for not only increasing its revenue but to also build its engineering backbone. With over 1,000 engineers in the Bengaluru and Hyderabad already, Su said the R&D operations here would be strengthened further. Edited excerpts:

How important is India in AMD’s global strategy?

India is very important to us from our technology base perspective. India contributes in two big ways. One is as a consumer. What India is doing in promoting technology and broadband access and PCs for the population is an important market for us. When I see some of the work in the commercial PC sector, some of our top focus is in India.

From an engineering standpoint, India is about 15-20 per cent of our engineering population. It's a large piece of what we need to get our work done and I see it as a growing piece as well. So I think from both sides, I view India as an opportunity.

How are you looking at going from design to manufacturing in India?

We are very open to local manufacturing. The idea is when you support an ecosystem, to support in its entirety. So from a design perspective, our philosophy is not that of cost arbitrage. The way we want to look at it is we would like to do end-to-end design in India. We've invested for many years and so at some point to do end-to-end product in India is very much a possibility.

Are you looking at tapping into the massive start-up ecosystem in India?

I think it is a possibility. For example, some of the work that we are doing in VR, overall when we look at VR, it is such a new marketplace that we want to invest in start-ups across the world.

You have a large market share in the virtual reality market. Do you see that as a big revenue contributor going ahead?

I think we are at the beginning of the VR market. VR is going to expand over the next five or 10 years. We may be over 80 per cent of the market but it is still relatively small.

If you can think about the growth, you can imagine a factor of 5x or 10x that can happen over a period of next three to five years. I think that's the opportunity for us to provide technology and work with our partners in the ecosystem.

The feeling that you get (with VR) is different and not just for entertainment, whether you talk about gaming or movies, it changes the experience. I also think it will change educational experience, industrial and engineering experience. There are opportunities to use VR to enhance the way we operate in those areas. I think the key for us is to get quality to be good enough. So the quality being using VR without too many technologies and we can get the price point to the right place. But I view it as a very exciting market.

While mobile is seen as the fastest growing segment in electronics, why has AMD stayed away from it?

Mobile handset is a good market but even so I think some may say even handsets are somewhat maturing in terms of how many handsets can one person have. But the technology in some sense is being provided by many people. From AMD perspective, we are more of a high performance company. You’ll see us in PCs, in high end graphics, servers — data centre is another market growing very rapidly. So I feel very good about where we are focusing because that's where our special sauce is.

AMD has been in red for a while. What are you doing to stay away from that going forward?

AMD is 46 years old and if you think about companies that are 46 years old, through that time frame there are several changes. Five years ago, we were primarily a PC company and there have been several changes in the PC marketplace in the last five years. I think what you see for us today, my strategy is we are really a technology company with a focus on high performance CPUs and APUs as well as high performance graphics. We are looking for those places that require this growth in technology.

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