100% of Motorola phones, a Lenovo subsidiary, is already made in India through Dixon, its EMS partner. It exports 1.5 million phones to markets like North America. “The forecast for manufacturing in India next year is pushing $3.5 billion,” Katyal said, adding that around $1.5 billion worth of hardware will be exported.
Lenovo’s Bengaluru lab is also one of the four facilities of the company in the world for server innovation. The lab also works on hardware, software and firmware. After HP, Lenovo is number two in the PC/tablets market in India, and is also in the third position in the servers/storage market.
The company launched the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Pro series processors on Monday. “We have invested almost $200 million across 150 independent software vendors and we’re helping them develop AI use cases. Fifty of them are in the Asia Pacific region and in Bengaluru. Access to these resources is available,” he said.
How is AI used in Lenovo
“We are pushing $65 billion to $70 billion as a company with one of the most complex supply chains. There are a lot of active use cases of AI available internally. We have a tool in marketing called Studio AI where we can churn content. What used to take a few lakhs of rupees and a few days to generate, now is available in a shorter time. Our legal teams also use AI for complex tasks like cross-referring cases, and complex contracting work that we do,” Katyal said.
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The company has a large B2C business through Lenovo.com. “100% of India’s revenue, on the PC side, now happens through dot com,” he said.Reduction of import bill
The Indian government is likely to consider asking all electronics companies to reduce the overall import of laptops, tablets, all-in-one personal computers, ultra-small form factor computers, and servers by 5% of their total import bill, ET had reported on November 12.
Katyal said this is a fair policy and that it will encourage localisation of manufacturing. “There is some debate on the baseline on whether it should be last year or whether it should be an average of the past three years. Industry is trying to get aligned on this. We manufacture $3.5 billion worth of hardware and export $1.5 billion worth of made-in-India hardware,” he said.
“There was some uncertainty which is why the industry got jittery. We have a MeitY stakeholder meeting coming up this week as well. It is in the right direction of enabling the local ecosystem to thrive,” he said. Some of the industry leaders are voicing their concern because last year import curbs were announced and then withdrawn. This year also the licence period got over in September and then got extended by three months.
“Uncertainty is what no business leader would like. As long as things are certain, there is some reaction time and time to plan for it,” he said.
He also said that the talk about production linked incentive scheme 3.0 was more progressive. “It first encouraged assembly and manufacturing to happen out of India, and now sourcing will happen out of India which is a good incentive for other parts of the supply chain to set up shop in the country,” Katyal said.
