IESA launches Chennai Chapter to strengthen supply chain in South India

CHENNAI: The India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, the trade body representing the Indian Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) industry, has launched their Chennai Chapter. The key objectives of setting up an office in Chennai is to widen the eco-system, acquire new members and strengthen the supply chain in the region.

Chennai is known as the Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) hub of India with the EMS Corridor stretching from Sriperumbudur to Oragadam. Being one of the fastest growing manufacturing metros, its accessibility as a seaport and having a significant share of manufacturing units for major technology companies with automotive and OEM’s being the core hub, was an obvious choice for IESA’s expansion. With this announcement, IESA has taken a step further towards achieving its objective of making India a global electronic manufacturing hub in order to boost the electronic manufacturing market in the country.

Commenting on this K Krishna Moorthy, Chairman, IESA, said, “IESA has embarked on a focused outreach activity in 2016-17 to expand our presence across India and Tamil Nadu comes right on top of that activity. We are happy to have formal presence in Chennai and are determined towards providing a collaborative platform to promote Made-in-India products in India and globally. With the commencement of our activities from Chennai, we will have greater opportunities to connect and collaborate with companies to help them create products and solutions to cater to the ever-increasing electronics systems demand in India. With an already strong base of electronics manufacturing in the state with suburbs of Chennai and Coimbatore as the 2 major cities of innovation and product realization, we hope to partner with the companies in electronics design and manufacturing and services to put the Indian ESDM industry on the global radar. This is a part of the process of IESA further expanding its presence in the country to be able to promote the digital transformation and making India the global epicenter of electronics innovation.”

M N Vidyashankar, President, IESA said, “The Central government has announced a fair share of investment in the electronics manufacturing sector which is expected to generate capacity creation on a larger scale within the country. Today close to 40% of electronics for the automotive industry is supported from Tamil Nadu alone. IESA is highly inclined towards the achievement of this objective and is striving towards building support for the companies across the states like Tamil Nadu to promote conducive manufacturing of products for global markets.” He further added, “Developing vendor base and supply chain is critical for the success of this industry. Chennai is a bed of talent and technology and with the State government’s incentivized policies, we see it becoming a global destination for products and services. Local manufacturing of electronic items have picked up with increase in value addition.”

Tamil Nadu is known as a global electronics equipment manufacturing and hub with Coimbatore being home to large number of auto electronic component industries. Companies like Flextronics, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Foxconn, Samsung, Cisco, Sanmina, and Dell have chosen Chennai as their manufacturing hub. Products manufactured include circuit boards and cellular phone handsets with Ericsson also has a Research and Development facility in Chennai. Big Electronic Product Code (EPC) companies have set up their engineering centers with the manufacturing sector growing at 3.53% which was higher than the country's growth rate for the sector at 0.71% in the year in 2013-14.