10th Sept 2008

    Semiconductor-manufacturing investment flow of 23 billion USD into India

A total investment-proposal of close to 23 billion USD is in various stages of initial progress for manufacturing solar arrays, polysilicon material, Integrated Circuits and LCD displays in India.

Though India's electronics industry need a local IC fab, but the investment is getting more into solar photo voltaic cell manufacturing. After the Government of India has announced special incentive package schemes to various sections of semiconductor manufacturing, there is a good response to this program with proposals received from12 companies to invest a total of 100K Crore Rupees. In the proposals, except Videocon and Reliance all others wanted to invest in solar cell field.

This trend of more investment in solar industry does not fully augur, the region's desire to develop robust hardware industry. India needs more IC and specialized electronics device manufacturing plants. However the growth of solar industry will help to build low cost green energy alternates and also India can become leading supplier of solar power systems and parts.

Here is the list of companies who have given their proposals to Government (sorted by the order of investment amount).

Reliance Industries Ltd
Lanco Solar (P) Ltd
Solar Semiconductor (P) Ltd
Signet Solar Inc
Videocon Industries Ltd
PV Technologies India Ltd
Titan Energy System Ltd
Bhaskar Silicon Ltd.
KSK Surya Photovoltaic Ventures (P) Ltd
TF Solar Power (P) Ltd
Tata BP Solar India Ltd
Phoenix Solar India Ltd

Recent market analysis by few research companies has ranked India as number one growth market for semiconductor devices in the coming years; hope this may trigger few more proposals. More into IC manufacturing!