Samsung Electronics is looking at increasing its investments in electronic components manufacturing in India, according to Gee Sung Choi, president and CEO (digital media business), Samsung.
He declined to comment on the size of the planned investment, but said that it would be done in readiness to tap the huge impending demand for electronic goods in India.
"India is already the fourth-largest market for CTV and the sixth-largest for mobile handsets. We believe that by 2010 the Indian market will be for 17 million CTVs and 75 million mobile phones," he said.
Choi also attributed the preference for India for manufacturing investment because of the high quality of the workforce in the country.
"Already, our company's plant in Noida, which manufactures CTVs and appliances, is number one among all such facilities in the Samsung empire, in terms of productivity," added Choi.
Speaking at the second Korea-India Economic Summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry on Monday, Choi said that with the right government policies in place, India could become the electronic manufacturing hub to service the markets in the SAARC region, the Middle-East and Africa.
"Samsung India exports CTVs to UK, Russia and Spain. The response to the "Made-in India' tag and has been very good," he said.
Samsung expects the Indian consumer durables market, currently at $6.3 billion, to grow at 18 per cent annually to reach $15.3 billion by 2010.
"With such a huge domestic market, there is a great opportunity for Samsung and other Korean firms with electronics manufacturing expertise," he added.
He expressed satisfaction with the quality of work at Samsung's R&D facilities in Bangalore and Noida and said that its work in the areas of embedded software and home networking had been successfully deployed in Korea and other markets. Currently, Samsung employs 850 researchers at its two centres in India.
"There are over 100 MNCs in India who have set up R&D centres. But there is a need to deepen the software capabilities. Korea is leading the world in home networking and mobile communication. Working together we can generate 450,000 R&D jobs every year," said Choi.
Posco units by 2009: Korean steel major Posco expects to begin production in India by 2009 as part of its plans to increase its global capacity to 50 million tonnes per annum in the next 10 years.
"We plan to set up integrated steel mills with capacity of 10 million tonnes per annum in Orissa. The project will have a capacity of 3 million tonnes in firstphase and operations will start by 2009," Posco's President and CEO Kang Chang-Oh said.