Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon meets PM Modi, says committed to partnering with India

Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon, during his current trip to India, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss 5G along with India’s semiconductor opportunity. In September 2021, PM Modi had met Amon during his visit to the US.

“A great privilege to meet again with the Hon'ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week. We discussed #5G, India's semiconductor opportunities and the broad digital agenda. Qualcomm is committed to partnering with India for the long term and advancing the #DigitalIndia initiative,” posted Amon on Twitter and professional networking site LinkedIn.

Earlier this week, Amon during a select media round table had said 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 also incubated 100 startups in India to date and is also in discussions with Indian automobile companies for its technology solutions.

Semiconductors

With the world looking at diversifying the semiconductor fab production, the world’s leading fabless company - Qualcomm too has asked its suppliers to diversify and move to different locations, and is open to sourcing chips from India, given 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, like many governments, wants to have a resilient and global, diversified semiconductor supply chain. Amon says it is not about just 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 semiconductor.

Amon says this is not a problem that one country is going to solve alone, and the industry can move on only with true partnerships. Acknowledging India has an incredible opportunity, he said ”I think, there have been positive discussions between the Indian government and other governments to think about how to participate in this new global semiconductor supply chain. India has an important role to play. And as India looks to find its role in leveraging its talent and knowledge… we will be more than happy to bring our scale (to the country).”

5G

Amon’s current visit coincides with India’s 5G launch, and he believes India will have a vital role to play in giving scale to 5G devices. He says 5G 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.

Speaking about the rollout of 5G and the development of 6G, Amon said, “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 that G gets developed. But during this process, many of the inventions and techniques designed for 5G ended up being applied to 4G. We expect that the same thing is going to happen. Many features being developed for 6G are likely to be part of 5G.”

Also read: 5G launch: Every ‘G’ in cellular telephony is designed to solve a problem, says Qualcomm boss Cristiano Amon