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-Ajai Chowdry, CEO, HCL Infosystems
He is the man who firmly believes that India has the
potential to become a hardware powerhouse. He was also part of the IT hardware
taskforce set up by the Prime Minister of India; and believes that it's the
easy financing option and availability of content that would drive PC
penetration in India and not just the low cost PC. Nevertheless, under his
stewardship, HCL Infosystems has been able to bring the 'branded PC' segment
close to the sweet spot—the sub 10k level. Ajai Chowdhry, one of the
six founder members of HCL, has beeen a key force behind HCL Infosystems, the
company whose reins he took over as chairman in 1999. In an interview with
Yograj Varma and Subhendu Parth, Chowdhry shares his views on the road ahead for
domestic hardware manufacturing and HCLI
Do you see HCL Infosystems focusing more on the
channel business or will it still remain essentially a hardware company?
I look at things very differently. For me, whether it' channel or direct
or manufacturing—at the end of the day it's business. Now, if I look at the
core competence of this company, it is about taking products to customers.
Whether the method used is through dealers or direct is irrelevant. The second
issue is that the core competence of this company originally was “direct
selling” or hardcore sales as you may call it. Over the years, when we went
into PC retailing and PC selling we understood the PC distribution game. That is
what really brought to us the concept of taking distribution to the next level.
Nokia happened to be a product in that space and we developed a good
relationship with them. We have grown the business together. That is the way I
look at this-at the end of the day it's still taking the product to the
customer.
With laptop prices nose-diving in the country, can we
expect HCL repeating the Nokia success with Toshiba?
Well the PC market is nowhere close to the phone market today in terms of
numbers. So I think we are still two to four years away from that level. And
that is the reason why I have spent the last 8 to 10 months in getting the
market creation to happen in the PC space... Also, while lot of people feel that
India has missed the manufacturing bus in electronics and hardware, I don't
believe so. I believe that the bus is just starting! The logic, as I have always
stated, is that if you create a large domestic market, the manufacturing
automatically happens. I have proven my point, when the large domestic market
was created; a whole bunch of cell phone manufacturing came to India. And it's
not that they are just going to do screwdriver technology here, they are
bringing their complete ecosystem. That is the momentum that I want to see India
get into.
Where do you see hardware manufacturing heading in
India?
I am very bullish on hardware manufacturing in India. Today my single point
agenda is to try and see how the report 'roadmap for domestic IT in India'
gets implemented. The government has already set up several sub committees
within the department of information technology (DIT) to actually take forward
and implement pieces of that. We are now seeing some momentum in the areas that
we have talked about in the report. The first thing that the report talks about
is the need to bring manufacturing to India and create a very good policy for
electronics manufacturing in the country. The government has recognized this and
the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council has come out with its first
paper on industries identified for promoting manufacturing in India. The list
also includes IT hardware. Hence, for the first time-after a long
time-it has been recognized that hardware manufacturing is a requirement.
Do you believe we do not have as much bargaining
power as China in terms of attracting investment in manufacturing in India?
You have absolutely hit the nail on the head. China has done a much better
job than us in terms of bargaining. But I think there is a lot of realization on
this front in the country today that we can also play in the space. If you look
at three years ago, everybody, including the government, used to ask why we need
to have manufacturing when we can do everything with services. When I take
someone to my facility in Pondichery, I often get the feedback that this is
assembly and hence what was the value add. People don't understand that
engineering is a value add; testing and integration is a huge value add as the
same is not done by some low level production guy but engineers. So there is a
lot of value add that goes into manufacturing in India. In fact, with the
success of auto manufacturing in the country, the realization that design,
engineering, testing, integration are huge value adds of India has hit
everybody. There is now a very clear thinking in the government and bureaucratic
circles that manufacturing is a requirement for a large country like India.
Also there is a realization that it's not prudent to
import a whole bunch of manufacturing products into India. It may be okayÂ
for a country like Singapore, but it's a mistake that we have made for a
country like India to stay away from manufacturing.
What should be done for increasing PC penetration?
Couple of things...firstly, I think that breaking the Rs 10k barrier for a
PC is not that critical. What is more important is financing of Rs 10k. It's
the availability of easy financing, which would increase home buying. Secondly,
let's get broadband at homes. I think that it is imperative that we should
bring PC plus Internet at a monthly rate between Rs 400 to Rs 600 to get the
ball rolling. This is the area on which the government is now working.
What about the other key component-the content?
Content is some thing that the government alone cannot take care of. To my
mind, the industry also has to play a key role on this front.
Well... similar initiatives have been talked about in
the past, but nothing much has happened. What makes you so upbeat now?
If we look at education, the government has already formed a committee for
ICT in education. The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and the
Ministry of Information technology (MIT) are working on it together. The vision
is to take ICT to every school in the country.
Is there a definite deadline to achieve it?
At the moment it's not concluded but they are definitely working on it as
a mission mode project, which is exactly what we had suggested in the report.
Fortunately the MHRD, the department of education and the committee agree on
this as the single most important agenda and the sub committees are expected to
submit their report by December. Post this, the recommendations would move into
the government decision-making process of implementation. Conceptually they are
looking at a 2-4 year time frame to bring all schools under the ambit of this
project.
Can you elaborate on this? Is this initiative all
about IT education in the schools or is it about IT-enabled education?
In fact both-IT education and IT-enabled education are part of the
process. At the moment there is a very serous issue about IT-enabled education
in schools because IT education in itself does not make much of a sense at the
primary level like class 2, 3 and 4. While IT education should certainly be part
of the curriculum at the higher levels, at the primary level it should be used
as a tool to impart basic education. You will see a lot of effort being made
towards this end. Then you look at the IT-enabled rural India program.
Within this, the government has come out with the program
for 100,000 CSCs that they want to be in place within two years from now. This
means there would be a lot of action taking place in rural India, and that is
exactly the reason why we developed the rural PC. We knew that there would be
couple of areas where rural would be key. One, through organizations like ITC
and HLL; two, through a series of NGOs like the Swamiathan and Nasscom
Foundation; three, government related CSC projects; and fourth, panchayti raj
projects. Suddenly, there has been a lot of movement for IT in rural India
during the last six months. Then we have the health related projects. The
government has already formed a committee for tele-medicine. While there have
been some issues about standardization on this front, I think the momentum would
soon pick up. In fact, the DIT has already created two white papers defining the
standards and the direction of tele-medicine in India. While all of these may
not happen simultaneously, each of these would add to the demand generation.
Then there is this other area of affordable computing for
home where I have always maintained-despite the fact that HCL has launched a
sub 10K PC-that the value that is delivered to the customer is more important
than the price of the product. I have always maintained and even suggested in my
presentation to the government that we should not worry about the price too
much. Sooner or latter competition and technology would be able to handle the
issue. What we need to focus on is making financing easy. To me that is more
important than the product price.
What about generating demand for the SMBs?
The SMB market is completely under computerized. Only 17% of SMBs have
computers today, which is very pathetic. Unfortunately, we are not seeing much
action on this front either. We had actually suggested that the only piece that
would drive these guys, things that have driven the SMBs globally towards
adopting computers, is the availability of SMB-oriented vertical applications.
Besides, we need to give incentives to these people to buy computers. Singapore
did both-they made available applications online and also made 100%
depreciation. So that actually motivated people to buy. Corporate don't need
depreciation as a trigger to buy computers, they know the value that they can
get out of it. But it will certainly motivate SMBs to buy. That is why I believe
that it's an important move that the government needs to make.
But don't you think a bigger motivator would be the
need to comply? For example, in Singapore it is mandatory that all taxes be paid
online.
I had suggested that as a sideline in the report. But now that you have
mentioned it, let me tell you that there are a couple of such area that can
rightly drive PC purchase in SMBs. TIN is one such area. Another thing that can
be followed is the China route of golden taxation. VAT was an ideal opportunity
to move towards utilization of computing because in the VAT regime, you cannot
claim MODVAT if you do not have the bill. Hence, the whole chain has to have the
bill. What the Ministry of Finance just needs to do is to make it mandatory for
bills to be generated using computers. What this would mean is that all data
would essentially be online. This would cut down on manipulations and other hera
pheri. This automatically will trigger the biggest pull for IT in retail
segment. Today, only 2% of retail is organized and there are nearly 700 mn
retail outlets, which can be the biggest chunk of IT purchase market. So if you
make VAT compulsory and link it with computer-generated bills, the whole SOHO
market will be driven towards adopting computing. Then we need to address issues
like making quality drugs available. We can do this by RFID tagging them and
tracking it from manufacturing to end delivery. This will make it essential for
every chemist and the whole supply channel to have a PC. These are the things
that need to be done to motivate people and business to buy PCs.
So what is stopping the government from adopting these
means?
I don't know. Actually, I mentioned this in the report in “sideline”
because when we were working on the same and I presented this to the government,
they asked me not to do everything at the same time. They said we should attempt
to bite few pieces at a time.