Google Set To Follow Apple Into India For Phone Manufacture
On today's episode, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks about Google setting up phone manufacturing in India...29 July 2023 5:30 PM IST
- <00:55> Google Set To Follow Apple into India For Phone Manufacture
- <03:03> Heat Waves are expanding across India, killing hundreds, with several economic implications as well.
- <06:49> Why women have another shot at traditional manufacturing jobs
- <09:23> Nandan Nilekani donates 400 crore to IIT Bombay. Donate or Set Up Your Own College, What Should Businessmen Do ?
- <13:24> And hmm..what Tata Power's managing director Praveen Sinha had to say on work from home.
TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript contains only the host's monologue and does not include any interviews or discussions that might be within the podcast. Please refer to the episode audio if you wish to quote the people interviewed. Email [email protected] for any queries.
Good morning, it's Wednesday, the 21st of June and I'm Govindraj Ethiraj coming to you from Mumbai, India's financial capital !
Our top reports of the day
Google Set To Follow Apple into India For Phone Manufacture
Heat Waves are expanding across India, killing hundreds, with several economic implications as well.
Why women have another shot at traditional manufacturing jobs
Nandan Nilekani donates 400 crore to IIT Bombay. Donate or Set Up Your Own College, What Should Businessmen Do ?
And hmm..what Tata Power's managing director Praveer Sinha had to say on work from home.
Google Set To Apple's Footsteps In India
Google is looking for suppliers in India to assemble its Pixel smartphones as it borrows from Apple Inc.'s playbook to diversify beyond China, Bloomberg News is reporting.
Google has apparently initiated early conversations with local companies including Lava International Ltd. and Dixon Technologies India Ltd. as well as Foxconn Technology Group's Indian unit Bharat FIH, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
Google would be the latest global technology player to move production to India. A mix of companies overseas and Indian have leaned on the Indian government's move to offer production-linked financial incentives aimed at boosting local manufacturing. This has already worked in areas ranging from airconditioner compressors to some electronics even as more sectors are ramping up. Apple has used the program to widen its supplier base in India and tripled iPhone output to more than $7 billion in the last financial year.
Google built about 9 million Pixel smartphones last year, according to Counterpoint Research. In contrast, Apple is believed to have shipped around 232 million smartphones last year.
Google's move, if it goes through, is symbolically strong because it is largely known for it's software and Android led apps presence in the domestic market, apart from very large development and support centres.
As signals go, a Google setting up in India would thus be a good one for local manufacturing, even if proportionately smaller than other similar moves.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also expected to meet Elon Musk today on a visit to the US to woo Tesla Inc. to make electric cars in India.
Tesla executives visited India last month to speak of domestic sourcing of parts and incentives with government officials during their recent India visit though it didn't culminate in a proposal to set up a plant.
Musk has engaged with other Asian countries including South Korea. In January, Bloomberg News also reported Tesla is close to a preliminary deal to set up a factory in Indonesia that would produce as many as 1 million cars a year.
Heat Waves Scorch India
At least 98 people are reported dead in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar following intense heat waves. While heat waves may not have been the direct cause of the deaths, it could have exacerbated an existing condition, given that many patients were admitted with chest pain, breathlessness and fever.
Temperatures in some zones between the two states crossed 45 C and hovered mostly between 42 and 44 C last week.
There have been successive heat waves in recent months with Mumbai alone experiencing at least four heatwave warnings this year alone.
Heatwaves are normal in summer, but the frequency and intensity are increasing. Cities are more affected as they are warming faster than neighboring areas.
Dr Chandni Singh, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements told The Core's Jessica Jani a few weeks ago that "If you look at past trends from 1951–2016, the frequency of hot days and hot nights increased significantly."
The human life impact is most unfortunate, given that people are exposed to heat waves because they mostly don't have a choice but to be in the open, in most times.
Roughly 50% or half of India's workforce labors outdoors.
A World Bank report in December said around 380 million people in India's workforce or 75% are dependent on labour frequently exposed to high heat.
India may account for 34 million of the anticipated 80 million job losses worldwide due to heat stress related productivity drop by 2030.
The data reflects the extreme, which is deaths, which too is disputed as has happened in Uttar Pradesh.
It is fact that for those labouring outside, heat waves will reduce their productivity and the number of hours they work. This in turn reduces their income levels.
Remember, half the country's workforce labours outdoors. It also goes without saying that a substantial part of this workforce if not all of it, will be in the informal sector and thus with limited medical benefits, or only
Government benefits.
While the Government in the centre and states have become more pro-active in declaring heat waves and warning people, much more needs to be done to ensure workers and thus livelihoods are protected.
This can be done by stepping up healthcare benefits or by mandating working conditions in both private and public sector that account for extreme weather.
By the way, please do not assume extreme weather is only heat.
The Lancet Planetary Health Journal said two years ago that annual deaths in India associated with high temperatures is 83,700 but deaths linked with abnormal cold temperatures stood at 655,400.
Speaking of heatwaves, an important decision that should help the trucking and logistics industry.
India's transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari has said that the Government is making it mandatory for air conditioning in truck driver compartments.
He acknowledged the difficulties of truck drivers during harsh weather conditions. "Our drivers operate vehicles in harsh temperatures of 43-47 degrees. I was keen to introduce the AC cabin but some people opposed it saying the cost of trucks will go up. Today, I have signed the file that all truck cabins will be AC cabins," Gadkari was quoted as saying by agencies.
He also said that this would help drivers who worked longer hours to make up for a shortage of drivers too.
Women and Manufacturing
There is much discussion around Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing. This is a subject we of course will return to frequently.
For now, and partly borrowing from McKinsey & Co, Industry 4.0 or the Fourth Industrial Revolution broadly means the current era of connectivity vis sensors and cloud, advanced analytics, automation including human-machine interaction via robotics and advanced engineering including via 3d printing and the like.
To get to the point today, the fourth industrial revolution offers, many other things, women to get into the manufacturing workforce perhaps for the first time and in a more concerted way than before.
To give you a quick background roughly 40% of Indians graduating in science, technology, engineering and maths or STEM as it is called are women though the number that get employed or take up employmenet is much less.
For example, women only constitute 14% of the total 280,000 scientists, engineers and technologists in research development institutions in India, according to the United Nations.
We are talking of manufacturing right now and here's why Industry 4.0 could offer new opportunities in the worlds of Rekha Menon, Chairperson and Senior Managing Director and Vice Chairperson Accenture India at a CII conference yesterday I was present at.
Ms Menon also touched upon the skill gap opening up and the need thus to upskill urgently for Indian industry as a whole and technology in specific.
Nandan Nilekani donates Rs 315 crore to IIT Bombay, total donation now at Rs 400 crore
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has donated ₹315 crores to IIT Bombay, building on his previous grant of ₹85 Crores to the Institute, bringing the cumulative value of his support to ₹400 Crores.
Nandan Nilekani said, "IIT-Bombay has been a cornerstone in my life, shaping my formative years and laying the foundation for my journey. This donation is more than just a financial contribution; it is a tribute to the place that has given me so much and a commitment to the students who will shape our world tomorrow."
The release noted that the donation will be instrumental in fostering world-class infrastructure, stimulating research in emerging areas of engineering and technology, and nurturing a deep tech startup ecosystem at IIT Bombay.
There are as we all know only a handful of donors to public institutions in India, mostly from the technology world. Some, non-technology business men like Ratan Tata and Anand Mahindra have pointed their philanthropy westwards in addition to within India. Tata's have earlier donated Rs 95 crore to IIT Bombay itself via the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust.
In 2010, the Tata Group donated $50 million to Harvard Business School.
Anand Mahindra donated $10 million to Harvard University to support the humanities centre in honor of his mother and renaming the center Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard in 2010.
It also depends on where you study of course. Nilekani studied at IIT Bombay while Mahindra studied at Harvard University and Harvard Business School. Ratan Tata Tata got his BS degree in architecture from Cornell University in 1962 though.
The question that has struck me when such large philanthropic gifts are made is who to?
Many businessmen and entrepreneurs in India would rather build a college or start a university rather than contribute to someone else. One way of looking at is that my vision for education is pretty different from whatever I see around me in India and I am better off starting a new one.
The other is that there are fine institutions in place and contributing to them will add proportionately much more in value to their cache than setting up another brand new college or institution.
In most cases, setting of an university becomes a business in itself, whatever the stated motivation. I reckon that's fine too but that does not achieve the same outcome, of say, producing the best in class graduates or engineering students in India.
We have now thousands of engineering colleges across India which are running below capacity and in many cases have shut down.
Close to 600 engineering colleges have shut in the last 7 years or so with more scheduled to shut down. Colleges in other disciplines like pharmacy have also shut down while many of these colleges across disciplines are running way below capacity, many below 50% and some even below 30%.
This tells you that this has been a gross misallocation of private capital and Government resources because many educational institutions being structured as public trusts get built on free land. Apart from the fees students pay leading to a degree which obviously has limited value in the job market.
There are many problems here and as many solutions but this is definitely a good time to look at wealth distribution in education..to whom and in what context.
Let's draw in an example from elsewhere. The famous investor and one of the world's richest individuals Warren Buffet does a lot of charity.
But guess what, he does not do it on his own, instead gives his charitable funds to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, depending on the Gates Foundation' organization and their people and leaving it to them to put the funds to whatever cause they deem fit.
Were you wondering about what the number was ?
Well, Warren Buffet's contributions to the Gates Foundation from 2006 now add upto $36 billion.
Work From Home? On Which Day?
What do manufacturing companies think of work for home, today? And how do the top brass view it?
Well, I could add more background but I thought it would be interesting to quote Dr Praveer Sinha, Tata Power MD and CEO on this theme while speaking on the context of jobs and skills.
Dr Sinha, whose company by the way announced a Rs 12,000 capital expenditure plan just the day before yesterday, also had a point of view to share which he says he shared with incoming engineers. Tata Power recruits 500 engineers annually.
Well, that's it from me for today, have a great day ahead and see you tomorrow
