At the recently held India Telecom Summit 2016, a panel discussion on the subject "Can wireless devices meet the billion online dream?" was held which was chaired by J.S. Deepak, secretary of the Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications, and moderated by Pankaj Mohindroo, president of the Indian Cellular Association.



The panellists for the session included names like: Hari Om Rai, Chairman & Founder, Lava International, Narendra Nayak, Managing Director, Blackberry India Pvt Ltd, Josh Foulger, Country Head and MD, Foxconn International Holding, India, Sandeep Bharghava, Executive VP, Corporate affairs and Public Policy, Vodafone India Ltd, Ramesh Vaswani, Director & Advisor , Corporate Affairs, Intex Technologies and P. Sanjeev, VP, Sales, Huawei & Honor India.



Speaking on the occasion, J.S Deepak said, "If you look at the success of the voice based sector in the last couple of decades, there are many things that have contributed to it like the private sector investments, technology, some good policy and regulation. But the most important element of this mobile revolution was the device, and when you look at the broadband era, we have seen the growth of smartphones which is still at 300 million, which is a small share of the total mobile device population. The entire premise of connecting India digitally primarily rests on the availability of devices. The big question in front of us is how in the coming short time, smartphones will become ubiquitous and how manufacturing will come to a level where we can manufacture almost 500 million devices by 2018."



Sharing his thoughts on the Subject, Ramesh Vaswani added, "I would have been happier if today's discussion was rephrased as - Can Indian wireless devices meet the 7 billion online dream? We are in India capable of manufacturing high quality products and capturing world markets. So we have to address the challenges and opportunities that the device manufacturing sector is facing and fortunately we have the full support of the government on this."



Underlining the need to open up to the global markets, Hari Om Rai, said, "In China 80% of the world's mobile phones are getting manufactured and China has been in this domain for the last 28 years. But now China's days of designing and manufacturing are getting over, given the cost factor. This presents a great opportunity for our country as it is becoming increasingly clear that the manufacturing and designing is shifting out of China. Moreover, India has a great advantage given its population, which is not only ready for consumption but also ready to be deployed for services in this sector."



Speaking on the subject, Josh Foulger, Country Head and MD, Foxconn International Holding, India said, "Our sector is a very technology intensive domain and also a complex supply chain structure. Even the skill intensity is very high if you look at the manufacturing. The fact is that this sector is almost entirely built around China. In fact 95% of the supply chain touches around China in one or the other way and for us to recreate the system will take some time."

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