Good to be back!

This post originally appeared in Pradeep Chakraborty's Blog!

It’s good to be back, especially after a long break! In my case, my long break was in form of an illness, which required surgery. I am still recuperating, and am only able to sit in front of a computer for a short while. Finally, I decided to make use of that short window and see if I could add anything worthwhile.

Well, this past month, I’ve missed a lot of events. Recently, the ISA’s Vision Summit got over, with lot of stalwarts from the overseas, such as Stan Meyers of SEMI, and Malcolm Penn of Future Horizons gracing the event.

As per an ISA-Frost & Sullivan report released at the event, the Indian semiconductor market is likely to generate $5.49 billion in revenues in 2009, growing at 26.7 percent CAGR. The report for 2007-08, said, the market in 2006 generated $2.69 billion total revenues in 2006, lesser than the estimated $3.8 billion in the previous report.

Now these figures may impress those new to the semiconductor industry, but there are other ramifications as well.

Speaking at the ISA Vision Summit, Jairam Ramesh, union minister of state for commerce, said that the Indian government had received seven confirmed investments in the Fab city at Hyderabad, with a total value of $7 billion for 10 years.

Five firms have been given principle approval with $1 billion investment. Proposals of three other firms — Videocon, Moser Baer, and Hindustan Semicon Manufacturing Corporation (HSMC), have yet to be considered.

Reliance is said to have put forward a proposal for solar/PV manufacturing facility with an investment of $5 billion in Jamnanagar. This proposal is under consideration.
The majority of firms proposed to set up in Fab city are mainly focused on solar/PV.

This last bit is the interesting part. If everyone focuses on solar/PV, who will focus on the other ancillaries required to complete the semicon ecosystem? What about the LCD, OLED plants, etc., that were mentioned in the semiconductor policy?

No matter, the coverage of this event has been disappointing/has disappointed me.

I also missed NASSCOM’s Leadership Summit in Mumbai. There was another CIO event, but no problems. CIOL has it’s C-Change 2008 running from Feb. 21-23, which I will again have to miss due to health issues. Nevertheless, this event will focus on the making of an agile enterprise, and a reality check on how agile Indian enterprises actually are!

That’s all I can manage in about 10 minutes. Maybe, more stuff will show up later on, as my health gets better. Till then, keep rocking.