Cisco Chair Chuck Robbins thrilled to be in India, meets Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins, who is on a business visit to India is thrilled to be doing business in India. The global technology leader entered India 27 years ago and has the second-largest R&D base in India, for Cisco globally. “We made a bet here 27 years ago. We think it's been a great bet. It has paid off significantly,” said Chuck Robbins, Chair & CEO, Cisco.

Robbins also met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and had a series of strategic engagements with Dr.S. Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics & Technology, B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, CEO of NITI Aayog, and K. Rajaraman, Telecom Secretary.

Since Robbins' last visit to India, before the COVID-19 pandemic, he says a lot has changed in the country. “You can feel the physical infrastructure improvements that are occurring around the country. You can certainly understand the digital infrastructure progress that has been made with digital ID cards and payment systems. It's really astounding what has occurred over the last few years”

Acknowledging India is poised to be the biggest growth opportunity over the next decade, Robbins announced the company’s plan to once again invest in manufacturing in India. Cisco is now building core manufacturing capabilities in India, including testing, development and logistics, and expanding in-house repair operations. In addition to supporting supply chain resiliency, reducing lead times, and elevating the customer experience, this will add further impetus to the local economy.

“We are going to launch manufacturing here in India. And we're launching it as a global full manufacturing global node in our 17 country manufacturing footprint that we have around the world,” says Robbins.  “We would expect over a billion dollars to come out of that factory's first year relative to both domestic but also exports. We're going to use this as a global manufacturing node to actually export to region as far as Europe,” he added.

Cisco is launching two of its highest volume product lines in India - switching platforms, which are at the core of a lot of data centre networks in the country, and also a cutting-edge routing platform that sits in the core of some of the 5G network infrastructure.