Nuvoton Technology, Taiwan, a leading semiconductor manufacturer of 8051, ARM CortexM0/M4 and ARM7/9 microcontrollers, has recently opened its office in India. The company wants to tap this market and be one of the leaders in the coming years. Rahul Chopra of Electronics Bazaar caught up with Jason Lin, VP, Nuvoton Technology Corporation, Taiwan, and Jitendra Patil, president, Nuvoton Technology India Pvt Ltd, to learn more about the company’s initiatives for the India market
EB: Tell us something about your plans prior to setting up the India office.
Lin: We have been dealing with customers from India for a long time but began contemplating starting our India office in 2013 and, finally, in August 2015 we opened it. Our plan is to initially concentrate on sales and support, and then on developing more India-centric products. Our product portfolio includes microcontrollers, audio components, as well as cloud and computing applications related ICs, for which we see ample market opportunities.
EB: What are the kinds of applications for which you see a lot of demand in India?
Lin: Regarding applications, we are witnessing demand mainly from industrial and consumer verticals.There is also demand for motor control applications. We are expecting growth in demand for brushless direct current (BLDC) MCUs, and are seeing great potential even in emerging market applications, like LED lighting, solar energy management, security applications, home automation, etc.
EB: So, what components do you offer in the IT hardware and cloud computing businesses?
Lin: We offer controllers for logbooks, IO chips, besides some power management chips along with hardware monitoring ICs for PCs. We also offer ECs (embedded controllers) and TPMs (trusted platform modules) for notebook security. We are one of the top three suppliers of ECs, worldwide. So whether it is for the PC or for cloud computing, we provide high voltage components for our customers. With regard to microcontrollers, we have 8051, then we have Cortex M0 and not to miss our ARM7 or ARM9 processors and related System-on-Chips (SoCs). In India we started with 8051 long ago, for which we have a lot of customers. But today, we are witnessing great movement and growth in CortexM0/M4.
EB: Is Nuvoton targeting the emerging market of IoT products also, and trying to promote BLDC MCUs in India?
Patil: Yes. IoT is the next big thing for every segment, be it energy, industrial automation, building or home automation, security, consumer durables or even healthcare, to name a few. As per various market research reports, IoT would continue to be on the fast growth track in the Asia Pacific region. India would be certainly among the top spenders on IoT, considering the available market. But, we want to go one step at a time and do our homework well, as we have just entered the India market, which may be the right time for IoT and other emerging applications. We will come out with more specific offerings soon, as we would like to provide an ideal platform for our customers. BLDC, too, is a promising segment worldwide, considering the global focus on energy saving and we are contemplating entering it.
EB: Since you have set up a new India office, what have you set out to achieve in the next two years from this market?
Patil: By setting up a 100 per cent subsidiary, we are conveying the very important message that we have long-term plans for the Indian market. Our first target is to build customer confidence in the Nuvoton brand by showcasing our world class technological product offerings, along with our support system. We are happy with the response we are getting with our customer engagements, and our first priority is to meet customer expectations. Nuvoton’s proposition is to bring customers new solutions inspired by innovation.
EB: What was the first challenge you faced when you entered the market?
Patil: The first challenge was to get the brand name Nuvoton established and remove misconceptions about us being only an 8051 MCU company (as this MCU dominated the weighing scale market ever since our products entered the India market way back in 2010/11). I think we have more or less achieved that in the last two years, and we would give the credit for this to our progressive customers who engaged with us on our new range of products like CortexM0/M4, ARM and SoC products.
Today, Nuvoton is the leading MCU provider in Asia with a track record of shipping over 100 million CortexM0 MCUs in a year and customers see value in engaging with us. A lot of good work is being done by our Indian distributor partners, and they share the same philosophy as Nuvoton in engaging with customers. The next challenge will be to increase our customer engagements as fast as possible with a growing team, and our distributor partners working as an extension of Nuvoton.
EB: How frequently are you releasing your reference designs?
Lin: We constantly take feedback from our customers and if they want any changes to be made, we comply with that. We are also concentrating on making India a design hub in the future because we observe a lot of potential in this country.
Patil: Yes, I think that it’s very important for the India office to start earning profits and also concentrate on the application design aspect of it, as both these things go together. India is a design hub and there is a good pool of talent for software and hardware for application/reference designs. It’s a well-known fact that there are many design houses in the country and many of the chip designs, too, happen in India.
EB: In terms of application areas, where are the maximum orders coming from in India?
Patil: In India, I think that the industrial segment is dominant, but we are getting mixed business as our products can be used in any embedded application. We are looking forward to witnessing a spurt in local manufacturing with the present government’s ‘Make in India’ and ESDM drives. We hope to get opportunities to work in the high-volume end-equipment domains.
