NEW DELHI: Dell is keen to use India as a manufacturing hub for exports to South Asia but it wants a more conducive framework in terms of duties and structures, the American technology company’s global chief financial officer Thomas W Sweet said.Sweet, who met finance minister Arun Jaitley last week during his visit to India, told ETin an interview that recent changes to the duty structure have helped the company increase production from its plant in India but exports will require more in terms of policy changes. “There is a lot of opportunity for India to be a great domestic market for technology consumption, but there is also a great opportunity for it to be an exporter of technology,” said Sweet.Dell’s factory in India that primarily caters to the domestic market is “growing very nicely”, but the company also sees India as a regional manufacturing hub, Sweet said. But that “takes times, takes the right set of policies to enable this,” he said.Sweet said the meeting with Jaitley last week was an opportunity to give him some flavour of what Dell does in India and give him a perspective on the opportunities.“Our conversations are in line with what the government has been saying…that part of being a global economy is being both a domestic consumption economy and an exporter. So we think there is an opportunity (to export) at an appropriate time, when policies and framework that encourage that kind of economic activity,” he said.He said that the company, which went private a couple of years ago, understands that changes do not happen overnight.“There is a lot on the government’s plate right now with GST , etc. But over time making sure that the framework around how you treat exporters and the exporters make sense, is important to us,” Sweet said.He said that the changes which have happened in the past two years are more domestic oriented and a few more measure are needed to ensure that the tax and the duty structures make economic sense to export as well from India. Dell’s ambitions to export out of India are not new. The company had set up the factory in India with exports in mind, but it did not find the tax regime conducive to manufacture in India. For many years, its plant was running under capacity as the bulk of its demand was being met through imports.Sweet said that there is no fixedtime frame for initiating exports from India and the company will wait for the right policies to come through. “We are patient, we are long term in India because it is a great place to do business,” he said.The company, which has been trying to diversify from being a manufacturing firm to being an equally strong services player, has been going through a major management realignment with the acquisition of storage firm EMC for $67 billion earlier this year. On the other hand, it sold its services arm Perot Systems to Japan’s NTT Data.