Texas Instruments bets on emerging businesses

S Shyamala, Chennai
Financial Chronicle

Semiconductor major Texas Instruments India (TI) is betting big on emerging business areas such as home automation, wireless technologies and domestic low-cost medical equipment manufacturing. Though the global semiconductor market is expected to shrink by about 5 percent, the Asia Pacific region including India will see a healthy growth, a company official said.

The Indian semiconductor market was worth about $2.4 billion in 2008 and it is expected to grow by at least 13 percent this year, said Srinivas Kasa, general manager, South, sales and marketing, Texas Instruments India. However, Kasa refused to reveal financial details and expectations of the company for the year in India.

Emerging growth areas including light-emitting diode (LED) lighting devices, liquid crystal display (LCD) televisions and video surveillance will help in propelling the company’s growth in the country, he added. TI markets more than 50,000 semiconductor products catering to several business verticals such as automobiles, energy, telecom, industrial applications and medicine.

“Although our research and development centre is present in India for the past 23 years, we started focusing on the region as a potential market only in the past three years. There are no local semiconductor companies catering to the needs of the market. We have a large opportunity and have accordingly expanded our sales set up to 14 tier-I and tier-II cities in India,” he added. The Asia Pacific region is the largest revenue contributor to the company because of the enormous manufacturing activities in China, Taiwan, the Philippines and India, he said. Though growth in the sales of consumer electronics and hence semiconductors may be tapered down across the world, the Asia Pacific may not be largely affected because of the local demand, Kasa added.