India's Tata Group plans to invest heavily in semiconductor manufacturing in the coming years. The country is just taking the first steps there. So far, all the know-how and the chips themselves have been imported, often made into a product in the country and then exported again.
Tata Sons Chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran is confident that India should thus become an important manufacturer in the semiconductor industry. However, it remains questionable whether they will go this route all alone, because they have no real experience. Nikkei reports that the first projects will probably result in a partnership with established companies in the industry.
Tata announced in June this year a partnership with Renesas for semiconductor design and the resulting development. You are now primarily looking at the first steps in production, but real chip production including all exposure steps of the wafer is a completely different caliber than test & Assembly, which is quite the order of the day in countries like India, but also in neighboring countries like Malaysia and Vietnam.
India wants and needs its own fabs
The steps taken by India and the companies involved in this area are being followed with excitement. An estimated 1.4 billion people lived in India in 2021. Due to the large number of people, the market is considered to be one of the most important for the future alongside China. Nevertheless, the country has so far imported most high-tech products and almost everything to do with chips from other countries. The equivalent of around 10 billion US dollars were approved in a first step by the government in India. This should lay the foundation for domestic chip production and create appropriate incentives for larger companies. In the long term, India wants to invest significantly more money in this area; according to the latest reports, it could now be up to 30 billion US dollars.
The Tata Group employs almost one million people worldwide Employees in around 100 companies. It is known, among other things, for Tata Motors, to which Land Rover and Jaguar belong, but the largest part of the conglomerate is provided by Tata Consultancy Services with over 600,000 employees and also multiple German locations. Overall, the group generated sales of almost 130 billion US dollars last year, so the planned investments of 90 billion US dollars over five years are not impossible. Getting into the chip business would be good for your own car division, 90 percent of the electric cars sold in India come from Tata Motors, which has so far been dependent on chips from abroad.