New leaf: India starts PC exports.

BANGALORE: This could be the beginning of India's efforts to cut seriously into a space — PC exports — that has been dominated by China, Taiwan and some South East Asian countries. About two weeks ago, Dell made its first exports out of India, from its PC manufacturing plant in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu.

Dell said it had started exports but declined to provide details. Sources close to the company, however, said Dell would be exporting several thousand desktop computers a quarter to the Middle East. The company's Sriperumbudur plant has the capacity to make 1 million units a year and most of the production from the plant has so far serviced the rapidly growing domestic market, where Dell last year sold about 8.5 lakh PCs.

Vinnie Mehta, ED at MAIT said if Dell indeed had started exports, this would be the first large PC brand to go into overseas markets. There were attempts earlier, but not much came of it. Our hardware exports have so far been skewed towards mobile handsets, he said. Nokia, for instance, has been exporting from its plant near Chennai and has said it intends to make India a hub for exports.

Sources said it was cheaper for Dell to supply from India than it was from China, especially to countries in the Middle East, Africa and the CIS countries. Mehta said infrastructure improvements and reduction in tax rates had helped to make PC exports a successful business. But whoever is going into it has to think of setting up global scales of production, which Dell has done.

Wipro said it does not export its PCs. HCL did start exports but sources said it hadn't made much headway; the company had not provided its export figures at the time of going to print. However, some others like Delhi-based Simmtronics Semiconductors have been making efforts towards PC exports. Simmtronics has been in the business of making memory modules, but towards the middle of last year, it also started manufacturing motherboards and netbooks, which it calls Simmbooks.
"We are exporting about 60% of the 3,500-4,000 Simmbooks every month to the Middle East, Europe, the US and Thailand," said Indrajit Sabharwal, MD.

Source : TOI