Market push needed for hardware manufacture success: MAIT

While the market for hardware manufacture is looking up, thanks to increased

mobile and broadband usage, it would be a while before India could bec-ome a

major hardware design and manufacture hub. Govern-ment support, market demand

and duty structure, are key to the sector's growth, according to the hardware

industry.

Gopal Srinivasan, Director, TVS Electronics attributed the slow growth in

hardware manufacturing to the slow rate of PC penetration in the cou-ntry. He

was speaking at the MAIT seminar on "Implications of Zero Duty

regime."

"For this, both the govern-ment as well as the industry need to take

active steps to spread IT usage through education, e-governance ini-tiatives,"

said Ram N Agar-wal, MD and CEO, WeP Peripherals Ltd.

Echoing his views Vinnie Mehta, Executive Director, MAIT said that the

hardware industry needed to promote IT usage in a collective campaign.

On the brighter side, pane-lists noted that the mobile revolution had driven

interest for the hardware manufa-cturing sector. Hardware consumption in India

currently stands at $ four billion and according to MAIT this has a potential to

touch $44 billion by 2010.

MAIT's Mehta suggested that domestic manufacturers could make use of

incentives at Electronic Hardware Parks (EHTP) and Special Economic Zone(SEZ) to

get tax benefits.

Industry players also stressed that hardware manu-facturing was not just

about PCs but the entire value chain. Emphasizing on the impor-tance of

establishing hard-ware clusters, Agarwal said, "The IT industry is highly

fragmented. We need to have clusters not only for hardware manufacturers but

also for design."

(CyberMedia News)