For world’s second largest computer chip maker AMD, India is the number one market as far as strategic importance is concerned as the company sees more opportunities for growth here than even in a market like China.
“From purely revenue perspective, Indian market is among the top 10 for AMD, but from strategic importance, it is right up there… India has a huge potential, bigger than even China in terms of where the market is going to go and investments. So from strategic importance, I will say India is number one,” David Bennett, Corporate Vice-President and General Manager (APAC and Japan), AMD, told The Hindu .
In the APAC region, which includes Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, along with India and Japan, India is the fastest growing market for the company.
“In all my markets not only is India an important market for us in terms of size and potential but also in terms of where we are succeeding. We have had some of our largest success here in India. We are doing extremely well,” he said.
Market shareIn India, the company has 36 per cent market share in the commercial segment, and around 18 per cent share in the consumer PC segment. Incidentally, 36 per cent share in commercial PC segment is the largest for the company among all its markets. For the consumer segment, the chip and graphic card maker is looking at increasing its share to 25 per cent by next year, and then gradually to 30 per cent.
“Last year, a good chunk of our business came from big public tender. But if you take them out, because they skew the ration, we are pretty even in commercial and consumer space. So you’ll see both consumer and commercial increasing outside the public tenders. Our goal is 50:50. We want to be the first region in AMD to achieve this,” Mr. Bennett said.
Talking about opportunities they see in India, especially with government’s projects like Digital India, “We are quite bullish about PC sales. We are committed to continue investments in commercial PCs, double in our core businesses like consumer graphics and diversifying our revenues. We have new line of businesses — embedded semi-custom servers for products like Sony PlayStation and Apple Mac Pro — these are our way forward in India,” he said.