During his current trip to India, Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss 5 G along with India's semiconductor opportunity. During his visit to the US in September 2021, PM Modi met Amon.
It was a great privilege to meet the Hon'ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week. We discussed 5 G, India's semiconductor opportunities and the broad digital agenda. Amon posted on LinkedIn and in Twitter that Qualcomm is committed to partnering with India for the long term and advancing the DigitalIndia initiative.
Amon told a media round table that Qualcomm has been in India for a long time and is working on the advanced and deep design in the country. The company has close to 18,000 employees in India, mostly engineers, of which 3,000 were hired over the last twelve months. The US fabless company has already incubated 100 startups in India and is in discussions with Indian automobile companies about its technology solutions.
With the world looking at diversifying the semiconductor fab production, Qualcomm has asked its suppliers to diversify and move to different locations, and is open to sourcing chips from India, due to its suppliers' setup fabs in India.
We have been very active in telling our suppliers about our desire to diversify and their ability to move to different locations. If our suppliers are motivated to build and they have the right incentives to build in India, we're going to use their fab, said Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm.
Qualcomm wants to have a resilient and global semiconductor supply chain, like many governments. Amon believes that it is not just about manufacturing advanced semiconductors alone, as there is an entire ecosystem to go around. This includes equipment providers, assembly and tests, as well as the manufacturing of a number of other technologies to go around the semiconductors.
Amon says that this is not a problem that one country is going to solve alone, and the industry can only move on with true partnerships. He said that India has an incredible opportunity and there have been positive discussions between the Indian government and other governments about how to participate in this new global semiconductor supply chain. India has an important role to play. As India looks to find its role in leveraging its talent and knowledge, we are more than happy to bring our scale to the country Amon's current visit coincides with India's 5 G launch, and he believes India will have a crucial role in giving scale to 5 G devices. He believes 5 G could be an instrumental technology to propel the digital-industrial transformation of the country and create an opportunity for Indian companies to play a larger role in the global ecosystem.
Amon said when you think about the rollout of 5 G and the development of 6 G, when you think about wireless technology and generation development, there is a graceful transition of technologies. We usually start developing a new G generation a decade before G is developed. Many of the inventions and techniques designed for 5 G ended up being applied to 4 G. We expect that the same thing is going to happen. Many features that are being developed for 6 G are likely to be part of 5 G.