One Thing Today in Tech

In today’s episode we take a quick look at the rise of global capability centres, as they are called, but first a few headlines.

Headlines

Apple’s iPhone 15 event, the Wonderlust, is to be held later today, where we might get to see the company’s first smartphone with the standard USB-C charging port. It’s at 10:30 p.m. India time and you can watch the event on Apple’s website.

Tata Consultancy Services is the second Indian IT services company, after Infosys, to join Dassault Systèmes’ Living Heart Project that brings together industry, academia, hospitals and regulators to build ever more accurate digital models of the heart, which will help develop more accurate treatment of heart diseases.

Perfios, which provides a real-time credit-decision platform and data aggregation APIs to financial companies, has raised $229 million in series-D funding from Kedaara Capital, the Bengaluru SaaS company said in a press release yesterday. The new investment is a combination of a primary fund raise and a secondary sale.

One thing today

Global capability centres, as they are now marketed, are offshore centres in India providing work for large multinational parent corporations, mostly in the US, Britain and Western Europe, but also from countries like Korea and Australia.

Many of you interested in India’s tech sector will of course be familiar with some of the history of how Texas Instruments came to Bengaluru, one of the earliest GCCs here – of course the term GCC didn’t even exist back then. Or take the expansion of Robert Bosch’s software and engineering teams in India.

The world’s best-known companies across sectors have such centres in India – from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to GE Aerospace and GE HealthCare and Mercedes Benz to Salesforce and Atlassian. There are close to 1600 GCCs in India, employing about 1.66 million people and accounting for $46 billion in business at the end of FY23, having grown at a CAGR of 11.4 percent from 2015 to 2023, or the year ended March 31, 2023, according to the consultancy Zinnov.

Many of these companies have multiple centres in India – typically in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and the NCR. Zinnov calls these individual centres GCC Units, and there were more than 2,740 GCC Units at the end of FY23.

In the first six months of 2023, 18 new GCCs were added in India including companies like BlackBerry, Truecaller and the Lloyds Banking Group. And several existing GCCs were expanded.

More recently, earlier this month, Zinnov provided a deep dive into two important sectors – Aerospace and Defence, and Automotive.

In Aerospace and Defence, companies that expanded their GCC operations in recent times include Boeing and Bombardier. Other top companies in the sector that have significant presence in India include Lockheed Martin, Rolls Royce, Thales, Collins Aerospace and Airbus.

Their GCCs and workforce are concentrated in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and NCR, which account for 80 percent of their installed talent as Zinnov calls it. Half of these companies are from the US, and 62 percent of their work involves engineering R&D, according to Zinnov.

In the Automotive sector, Daimler Truck, Fisker and Eminox are among the new entrants, and companies with existing GCCs include Ford, BMW, Stellantis, Hyundai and Mercedes Benz. About half of all the auto sector GCCs in India have parent companies coming from the US and Germany.

Pune and Bengaluru have the most GCCs at 52 percent of the units in India. Pune, Bengaluru and Chennai account for 85 percent of the installed GCC talent in the auto sector. And again, engineering R&D accounts for two-thirds of the work being done at these centres.

In today’s episode one quick takeaway from Freshworks’s first investor day since the company went public two years ago, but first a few headlines.

Headlines

NVIDIA and Reliance Industries, on Sep. 8, announced a collaboration to develop India’s own foundation large language model trained on the nation’s diverse languages and tailored for generative AI applications to serve the world’s most populous nation, according to a press release from the AI GPU maker.

Apple’s much anticipated iPhone 15 will be unwrapped tomorrow, and it will be nighttime in India. One big change everyone’s expecting is of course the USB-C port that Apple’s been forced to switch to, after the European Union mandated it for most electronics gadgets by next year.

One thing today

So last week, Freshworks organized its first investor day, on Sep. 7. Of course, the company has been providing quarterly updates and holding conference calls with analysts and so on since it was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange two years ago. But this was a bona fide investor-focused meet where the company provided some granular data on how it’s doing and where it’s headed.

The one takeaway for me, and probably for many others, was that the company’s Freshservice product is growing more than twice as fast as the company’s overall growth rate, and not on a very small base either.

As many of you know Freshworks was founded in 2010. It has headquartered in San Mateo, California, and CEO Girish Mathrubootham told analysts and investors that 85 percent of the company’s 5,000 or so employees are in India. Mostly in Chennai, but also in Hyderabad, Bengaluru and elsewhere.

The company has over 65,000 customers and 19,000 of those pay the SaaS vendor $5,000 or more every year in subscription fees of its software. Among its customers are Coca Cola, Honda, Sotheby’s, Thomas Cook, Klarna, African Bank, PhonePe and Mahindra Group.

This year, as Freshworks pushes to become profitable, it’s delivering 10 percent free cash flow margins, Mathrubootham said.

Freshworks started with a customer support software, Freshdesk, and today the overall customer support software business is at about $300 million ARR, and growing in the low to mid-teens percent annually, Mathrubootham said. But it’s Freshservice, the IT service management software and related products, that’s emerged as the most promising component of the company’s product portfolio.

“Today, that's our fastest growing product with north of $250 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue),” Mathrubootham said. An important reason could be that, especially post Covid, large businesses have been overhauling their IT, moving to the cloud and looking for ways to reduce the complexity of managing a hoard of the technology solutions, including multiple software subscriptions.

Freshservice clocked $260 million in ARR as at the end of the June quarter, which is Freshworks’s fiscal Q2. It was growing at more than 40 percent at the time, compared with the company’s overall growth rate of about 20 percent. The business has a total addressable market of some $20 billion, growing at 12 percent, according to market researcher and consultancy Gartner, including the areas of IT Service Management, IT Asset Management & Software Asset Management, IT Infrastructure Monitoring, AIOps, Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms.

In this segment, “our customer is the CIO, or a senior IT leader, and we have a lot of traction in mid-market and in enterprise,” Freshworks’s president Dennis Woodside said. The company has some 8,500 customers paying more than $5,000 in annual Freshservice subscription fees, he said.

In the coming months and quarters, Freshworks will launch more features to capture adjacent opportunities, Dennis said, with industry specific solutions, such as government agencies, security, operations, governance, risk and compliance.

In today’s episode we take a quick look at Zoho’s latest milestone, with the Indian SaaS leader crossing 100 million users, but first a few headlines.

Headlines

HeromotoCorp will invest up to Rs. 550 crore in a rights issue of Ather Energy Private Limited, the Indian two-wheeler giant told stock exchanges on Sep. 4 in a statement.

Atomicwork, a cloud software provider of productivity software, has raised $11 million in seed funding led by Blume Ventures and Matrix Partners, TechCrunch reports.

Richard Lobo, an executive vice president and former head of human resources at Infosys, has resigned, marking the latest in a series of top-level exits at the company, Moneycontrol reports.

One thing today

Zoho, India’s biggest cloud software company, has surpassed 100 million, the Chennai-to-California company said in a press release. Zoho says it is the first bootstrapped SaaS company to reach this milestone. Last year the company hit $1 billion in revenues, and Zoho is one of a handful of SaaS companies in India that are profitable.

Started more than 25 years ago, the company’s growth over the last 15 years, with the rise of the cloud computing model, has taken it from 1 million users in 2008 to 100 million today. The latest 50 million users were added within the past five years. And the company sells more than 55 products to over 700,000 businesses in some 150 countries, according to its press release.

“We are not done yet,” co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu said in the release. The company has an innovation pipeline covering the next 10 years and it is investing in deep technologies to serve billions of users around the world, he said.

Zoho defines midmarket customers as companies with 250 employees each and those with a thousand or more workers as classic enterprise, or the upmarket segment. India shows a significant presence of enterprise customers adopting Zoho, CMO Praval Singh had said in an interview with Forbes India in June this year.

In the SaaS business, larger customers mean more users and increased complexity, resulting in higher revenue per customer. The upmarket segment contributes over half of Zoho’s business in India, and a third of its entire business.

As its products matured, larger businesses adopted its solutions. This led Zoho to establish dedicated teams with expertise in serving large companies. “We also developed an interoperable ecosystem, enabling easy integration with third-party applications through APIs, connectors, and partnerships,” Praval said in that interview.

To cater to larger enterprises, the company launched the Zoho Marketplace, which has more than 1,800 extensions and garners 30,000 monthly installations. In 2018, Zoho introduced an enterprise business solutions team as trusted partners, offering assistance in digital transformation projects, from consulting to implementation and training.

Zoho has focused on helping large enterprises streamline and optimise their technology stacks, addressing challenges such as integration, data silos, scalability, and flexibility. By helping customers overcome these obstacles, Zoho has played a meaningful role in supporting their growth and progress over the years, Praval says.

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for Zoho, where the company has witnessed three year compounded annual growth of 65 percent in its upmarket segment. Customers in India include IIFL, Bigbasket and Tata Play Fiber.

Zoho's upmarket growth in India is led by sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, retail, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharmaceuticals, and IT. The company has collaborated with government departments and public sector units (PSUs) to support their digitalisation efforts and contribute to the modernisation of the public sector.

In today’s episode we take a quick look at edtech funding, from a report published by Tracxn. But first, a few headlines. 

Headlines

Telecom operators in India want internet companies to compensate them for using their telecom networks, a recommendation they’ve made to the local regulatory body, echoing a viewpoint that is gaining some momentum in other parts of the world, TechCrunch reports.

Pentathlon Ventures, an early-stage B2B SaaS-focused venture capital firm, has announced the launch of its second fund with a target corpus of Rs 450 Crore. The fund aims to invest in 25 B2B SaaS start-ups, the VC firm said in a press release.

One thing today

Now, after all the problems BYJU’s has faced, it might not surprise you that India’s edtech startups haven’t done very well this year, by way of funding, even though they were among the top three most funded geographies in this space, worldwide, in the first seven months or so of 2023, according to Tracxn, a leading provider of private markets intelligence in India.

India’s ed-tech startups sector has experienced a declining trend in funding, similar to its global counterparts, according to Tracxn’s latest Feed-Geo report on the ed-tech startups landscape in India.

Most of the funding into Indian ed-tech startups in 2023 so far was secured in the second quarter of the calendar year. Companies raised funding worth $713 million in Q2 2023, accounting for 73.43 percent of the total funding raised this year. This is also an increase of 37 percent compared with the same period last year. 

That said, total funding into the Indian ed-tech space plunged 48 percent to $971 million in 2023 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 7, the period for which Tracxn has compiled data for its report. edtech startups had raised $1.87 billion in the same period in 2022.

The 2023 YTD funding is also 50 percent lower than the money the sector raised in the same period in 2021, according to Tracxn. The number of funding rounds in 2023 fell 77 percent and 82 percent compared with the same periods in 2022 and 2021 respectively.

Late-stage investments worth $879 million have been recorded in 2023 so far, contributing to more than 90 percent of the total funding, which is also a drop of 23 percent compared with $1.14 billion raised in the same period in 2022 and a drop of 39 percent from $1.44 billion raised in the same period in 2021.

Early-stage investments worth $75.7 million were recorded in 2023 YTD, an 88 percent drop from $618 million raised in the same period last year and an 82 percent drop compared with $414 million raised in the same period in 2021.

Edtech startups raised $15.7 million through seed-stage rounds in 2023 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 7, a drop of 85 percent from $105 million raised in the same period in 2022 and an 83 percent drop from the same period in 2021.

No new Unicorns have so far emerged in this sector this year, as against two in the same period last year. 2023 saw seven acquisitions, a 70 percent decline compared with 23 acquisitions in the same period in 2022 and 19 acquisitions in the same period in 2021.

Among Indian cities, Bengaluru, far and away, takes the lead in terms of total funds raised till date, followed by Mumbai and Gurgaon. edtech startups in Bangalore have raised a total of over $8 billion as of Aug. 7, 2023, followed by Mumbai ($2.5 billion) and Gurgaon ($497 million).

In the last two years, We Founder Circle, Peak XV Partners, formerly Sequoia India, and MMPL Trust, were the most active investors in this space. We Founder Circle, IPV, and LetsVenture were the top seed investors, while Peak XV Partners, Better Capital, and AngelList were the top early-stage investors. MMPL Trust, WestBridge Capital, and The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative were the top late-stage investors.

Today, five takeaways on the future of India’s SaaS sector from the perspective of an early-stage VC investor, but first, a few headlines.

Headlines

India’s Aditya-L1 satellite, our first space-based solar observatory, was launched successfully on Sep. 2 at 11:50 a.m. local time, Isro said in an update.

Microsoft is ending WordPad, the basic word processor that’s been included with Windows since 1995, Thurrot reported over the weekend, citing a support page from the Windows maker.

Infosys has completed the acquisition of Denmark’s Danske Bank’s 1,400-person IT centre in India, the Bengaluru IT services company said in a press release on Sep. 1.

One thing today

There are optimistic projections about how India’s SaaS companies will become a $50 billion sector by 2030 and so on. But what are some of the obstacles they will have to overcome. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Arun Raghavan, founding partner at Arali Ventures in Bengaluru, and this was one of the topics we discussed for a bit.

Here are some quick takeaways from Arun’s experience, which includes successfully backing multiple SaaS startups very early on in their journey and even some good exits.

1. The go-to-market playbook is heftier than five years ago. So how does one create a sales engine that can have people sit in India and develop relationships with enterprise customers in the US and Europe. You can only do that to a limited extent if you’re only trying from India. And if you really want to go after large customers, you need feet on street. More companies doing this much better today, but there’s ways to go.

2. How do you scale a company sitting in India to become a $100 million dollar business, especially if you're selling into the US? This is work in progress. Typically, a company that starts in the US, which gets good talent, is off to the races, but the pool of people who have the experience of playing the cross-border game is still limited. The numbers are big in tech services, but not yet in the products startup ecosystem.

3. You may disagree, but the real cutting-edge stuff is still mostly coming from Silicon Valley or Israel and such hubs. That proportion is still 80-90 percent, Arun says. Of course, there are very interesting companies coming out of India, but it's not widespread yet.

Can a startup find a critical mass of generative AI experts quickly in India, for example? Not really, says Arun. And the more deeper tech players from India, more often than not, while they may have centres in India, they will also tap talent in Eastern Europe, for example, or Israel or the US or all of the above.

4. We need to go way deeper than the application layer. Traditionally, we’ve been great at application software. We’ve got a $200 billion tech services industry to show for it. But anything that's at a more infrastructure level, or tooling level is something that we don't have a lot of experience in, Arun says.

He expects these are areas where we will develop some knowhow over the next four or five years. Why is this important? Well, the infra players are relevant to customers around the world. For example, can we think of a Snowflake emerging from India in the next ten years, asks Arun? Or a Databricks?

5. The money is there now. To end on a more optimistic note, funding isn’t a challenge anymore, Arun says, the current slowdown notwithstanding. Over the last five years, large investors from the US have taken note of the potential for software product companies to come out of India and they have been investing in this ecosystem. This will only increase.

In today’s episode, sales of robots are down by almost a third from the first six months of last year. But first, some headlines that caught my attention.

Headlines that caught our attention

India's first indigenously developed nuclear power plant unit has started operations at full capacity, Business Today reports. The plant, in Kakrapar, Gujarat, had two existing 200 MWe units. This third unit, and a fourth one that is expected to go online in March 2024, are India's first pair of indigenously designed Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors of 700 MW size with enhanced safety features, according to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India.

Elon Musk said yesterday that video and audio calls will be coming to X, formerly Twitter. The features will work on iOS, Android, Mac and PC, Musk wrote in a post on the microblogging site. No phone number is needed because X is effectively a global address book, he added.

Google has announced Oct. 4 as the date for its annual Pixel hardware event, 9To5Google reports. Like last year, the event is taking place in New York City. The “Made by Google” event and keynote will be at 10 am ET. You can catch the livestream on YouTube and the Google Store website. Two of the devices expected are the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, according to 9To5Google.

IBM last month signed a $69.8 million (£54.7 million) contract with the British government to develop a national biometrics platform that will offer a facial recognition function to immigration and law enforcement officials, The Verge reports, citing documents reviewed by it and Liberty Investigates, an investigative journalism organisation in the UK. Some human rights activists have now accused IBM CEO Arvind Krishna of reneging on a promise he made three years ago to not build general purpose facial recognition technology for surveillance. IBM says this UK contract, meant to help police track suspects, doesn’t violate that promise, according to The Verge.

One thing today

Now, robot sales fell for the second quarter in a row in the US, the world’s biggest tech market. A slow US economy and high interest rates have taken a toll on robot orders in North America, resulting in a decline for the second quarter in a row after record purchases in 2021 and 2022, the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), said in a press release yesterday.

Companies ordered 7,697 robots valued at $457 million from April to July 2023, a 37 percent decline in robot orders and 20 percent drop in value over the same period in 2022.

When combined with first quarter results, the robotics market in North America is down 29 percent compared to the first half of last year with a total of 16,865 robots ordered. This drop comes after a record 2022, where North American companies ordered 44,196 robots, up 11 percent over 2021, the previous record.

The ongoing labour shortage in the US, especially in manufacturing (down another 2000 jobs in July, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics) remains a key driver of automation. An increasing trend towards reshoring tasks back to the US is another factor.

Non-automotive customers ordered more robots in the second quarter of 2023 than automotive customers, with 52 percent of units going to non-automotive industries and 48 percent going to automotive OEMs and component suppliers.

Both categories were down compared to the second quarter of last year, however, with non-automotive orders down 21 percent and automotive orders down 49 percent. The strongest demand in Q2 came from the semiconductor and electronics industries, followed by life sciences/pharma and biomedical, plastics and rubber and metals, with automotive components, food and consumer goods and automotive OEMs showing the biggest drops.

In today’s episode, we take a quick look at India’s opportunity to expand its digital technologies ecosystem to tier-2 cities, but first, some headlines that caught my attention.

Headlines that caught our attention

Google is expanding its generative AI search experience to markets outside the US, starting with India and Japan, TechCrunch reports. The new AI-powered search feature, also known as SGE (Search Generative Experience), will be available through Google’s Search Labs.

Meanwhile, Chinese tech giant Baidu said that its ChatGPT-like Ernie bot was now open to the public at large, signalling a green light from Beijing, and another indication of a more relaxed policy stance on artificial intelligence, CNBC reports.

In some cheer for the SaaS sector, Salesforce, cloud software bellwether, yesterday announced quarterly results and guidance that beat Wall Street’s expectations, CNBC reports. As many of you might remember, India’s Freshworks beat expectations with its June quarter earnings results on Aug. 2.

One thing today

Now, speaking of India’s tech talent, that workforce is making it a destination for the next wave of foreign companies looking to establish centres for R&D, software development and engineering. And there is an opportunity to expand the ecosystem to tier-2 cities, Nasscom, the country’s biggest tech lobby, and accounting consultancy firm Deloitte, say in a new report.

The report examines talent, infrastructure, risk and regulatory environment, start-up ecosystem, and social and living environment, which are vital for establishing a flourishing technological landscape.

And it spolights the potential of 26 cities in the country – from Chandigarh to Indore to Mysuru and Vishakapatnam – which could become an integrated part of India’s tech ecosystem, Nasscom and Deloitte said in a press release on Aug. 29. Helped by rapid infrastructure growth, diverse skills, burgeoning start-ups, and governmental initiatives, these emerging hubs are gearing to achieve tier-1 status, according to the press release.

“While big cities were the focus in the past, the post-pandemic era witnesses a remarkable decentralisation of work across the nation,” Sumeet Salwan, a partner at Deloitte India, said the press release. 

Today, about 60 percent of India’s graduates in engineering, arts, and science come from smaller towns and 30 percent of total graduates relocate to tier-1 cities seeking employment, he said.

The 26 promising locations identified in the report have the potential to become the epicentre of innovation and growth, according to the report. This trend is supported by a workforce skilled in cutting-edge digital technologies, with about 800,000 individuals located in these emerging hubs. And these cities are seeing strong additions to the number of people skilled in digital technologies.

These locations currently account for 10-15 percent of India’s tech talent. They provide promising growth potential when supported by the governments’ commitment to world-class infrastructure, Salwan says. Take the “if you build it, they will come” approach, he says.

Startups in these locations grew 50 percent from 2014-2018, with expectations of 2.2X growth by 2025, according to the report.

These tier-2 locations also offer a cost advantage, including a 25-30 percent lower cost of talent and a 50 percent lower cost of real estate rentals compared with the large cities. So far, some 140 global capability centres have found a home in these locations, highlighting the growing interest of foreign companies in these emerging hubs, according to the report.

“As companies worldwide revisit ways of working with an eye on optimising outcomes, costs, and talent, alternative tech hubs are becoming essential” Sukanya Roy, head, GCC and BPM, at Nasscom, says in the release.

About 39 percent of the country’s 7,000 or so startups operate in emerging hubs spanning industries from Deep Tech to Business Process Management (BPM), according to the report.

Apple yesterday announced Sep. 12 as the date for its annual press event, where usually the company launches new iPhones. The event will be held Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, and it is widely expected that the iPhone 15 series and new Apple Watch models will be launched. In India, Apple’s fifth-biggest market according to Counterpoint Research, contract manufacturer Foxconn is already said to be preparing to roll out the new phones within weeks of the launch.

Headlines that caught our attention 

Toyota will restart operations at its assembly plants in Japan today, after a software glitch in its production systems brought domestic output to a halt, Reuters reports.

WhatsApp has updated its desktop app for Apple’s Mac computers featuring group calls, connecting with up to eight people on video calls and up to 32 people on audio calls.

India’s next space mission, Aditya-L1, the country’s first space-based solar observatory, is set to launch on Sep. 2, Isro said in a tweet yesterday. The satellite will be launched on Isro’s PSLV-C57 rocket.

One thing today

Apple yesterday announced Sep. 12 as the date for its annual press event, where usually the company launches its next iPhones, tagging invites with a made-up word ‘Wonderlust.’ The event will be held Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, and it is widely expected that the iPhone 15 series and new Apple Watch models will be launched.

The event will be streamed on Apple’s website at 1 p.m. ET in the US, which would be 10:30 p.m. in India. CNBC notes that Apple has used pre-recorded videos to launch its iPhones since 2020.

First among the big changes and upgrades expected in the new iPhone models is the USB-C charging port, after the European Union passed a landmark law in October last year requiring all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU to use this standard port for wired charging, by the end of 2024.

Other recent leaks about the new iPhones include titanium bodies, which would make the phones lighter, and a sharper periscopic camera.

Apple will be making fewer iPhone 15 smartphones at launch, due to some supply chain issues, 9to5Mac reported earlier this week, citing an industry analyst.

In India, the year 2023 marked a milestone for Apple, with the opening of its first physical retail stores – in Mumbai and Delhi. These stores exceeded initial expectations, CEO Tim Cook had said on Aug. 3, with another quarterly record.

As many of you know, Apple’s been stepping up local assembly in India in recent years and the gap between the launch of a new iPhone in the US and its availability in India is now mere weeks. Foxconn, one of Apple’s biggest contract manufacturers, is said to be preparing to roll out the new iPhone 15 models from its Sriperumbudur factory near Chennai.

India’s premium smartphone segment, defined as phones priced at Rs. 30,000 rupees or higher, now contributes a record 17 percent to its overall shipments, according to data from Counterpoint Technology Market Research as of July 31.

With an 18 percent share, Samsung led India’s smartphone market for the third consecutive quarter. The South Korean electronics giant also led the premium segment with a 34 percent share at the end of the April-June quarter this year, according to Counterpoint.

One last point. While India remains an Android smartphone market, Apple dominates the so-called “ultra-premium” segment, with a 59 percent market share. Counterpoint defines ultra-premium as phones priced at Rs. 45,000 or higher. India is also now Apple’s fifth biggest market, according to the market research provider.

Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn Technology Group, one of Apple’s biggest contract manufacturers, which is also expanding its operations in India, is entering the contest to be Taiwan’s next president as an independent candidate, with elections due in 2024. Gou is widely seen as an advocate of Taiwan’s return to the “One China” framework and for cross-Strait talks to resume between China and Taiwan that broke down in 2016. While pundits don’t expect him to win, a more pro-China government in Taiwan could have some implications for India from geopolitics to the country’s nascent EV sector.

Intel plans to release a new data centre chip next year, brand named Sierra Forrest, that will handle more than double the amount of computing work that can be done for each watt of power used, Reuters reports. 

Asus yesterday refuted a report from earlier this week out of Taiwan that it would pull the plug on its Zenfone series of Android smartphones, 9To5Google reports.

Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn Technology Group, one of Apple’s biggest contract manufacturers, which is also expanding its operations in India, is entering the contest to be Taiwan’s next president as an independent candidate, with elections due in 2024.

While the pundits don’t expect the 73-year-old entrepreneur to win, with the current Vice President William Lai of the Democratic Progressive Party seen as the popular candidate, Gou’s entry is significant due to his more conciliatory approach towards China.

“The era of entrepreneur’s rule” has begun, CNBC quoted him as saying at one of the election rally style gatherings he’s been addressing lately.

“I will definitely not allow Taiwan to become the next Ukraine,” he said at a press conference, Associated Press reported yesterday.

Gou founded Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, in 1974 in Taipei, Taiwan. From making electrical components and parts for television sets, the company has grown to become one of the world's largest and most influential electronics manufacturers for customers including Apple, Microsoft and Sony.

In 2022 about 70 percent of $215 billion equivalent of Foxconn’s revenue came from China, according to the Wall Street Journal. In an opinion for Washington Post in July, Gou disagreed with what he described as the policy of the current Taiwanese government, under President Tsai Ing-Wen, to walk away from the One-China framework.

In his view, Taiwan’s long-term future rests with the Chinese. A more pro-China government in Taiwan has significance for India, from giving China greater ability to project its geopolitical power in the Indo-Pacific region to the potential impact on India’s electronics supply chain.

Foxconn entered India in 2006 and set up its first factory in the country at Sriperumbudur, near Chennai. Today the company’s operations range from assembling the latest iPhones to supplying parts for India’s electric vehicle startups such as Ather Energy in Bengaluru.

The company is investing billions of dollars in India, which is looking to establish its own semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem. Foxconn pulled out of a semiconductor fab partnership with India’s Vedanta Group recently, citing delays, which is seen as a bit of a setback for India’s ambitions in this sector, but the Taiwanese company has said it remains committed to growth in India.

Britian’s first lady Akshata Murty’s ownership of Infosys is in focus again, ahead of a free trade agreement that her husband, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is negotiating with India. The India-UK FTA talks started some 19 months ago and are said to be in their final stages. UK is the Indian IT sector’s biggest market after the US. While some British papers have suggested India is pushing for more liberalised visa rules, those negotiations are not part of the FTA talks.

Zepto, a super quick grocery delivery startup, has raised $200 million in a new funding round at a valuation of $1.4 billion, becoming the first Indian startup unicorn of 2023, TechCrunch reports.

Apple will be making fewer iPhone 15 smartphones at launch, next month, due to some supply chain issues, 9to5Mac reports, citing an industry analyst.

Separately, Bloomberg’s Apple watcher Mark Gurman writes in his newsletter that next year, Apple will launch a new souped-up version of the iPad Pro.

Britian’s first lady Akshata Murty’s ownership of Infosys is in focus again, ahead of a free trade agreement that her husband, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is negotiating with India.

Sunak is expected in New Delhi in two weeks, to participate in the G20 Summit, on Sep. 9. Meanwhile, news reports in the UK have once again raised Akshata Murty’s shareholding in Infosys, the Mumbai and New York listed Indian IT services giant, as a conflict of interest. They contend that Infosys, which sees the UK as one of its biggest markets, with customers including the British government, stands to benefit from the trade agreement, which in turn benefits Murty’s family.

Akshata’s father NR Narayana Murthy founded Infosys in 1981 with six other co-founders. Her current minority shareholding in Infosys, a tad under 1 percent, is valued at about half a billion dollars.

Newspapers in the UK such as The Guardian and Observer reported over the weekend that some members of the British parliament have called for Sunak to be more transparent about his wife’s financial holdings. At least one “expert” has even called for Sunak to recuse himself from leading the UK’s talks with India to finalise a free trade deal, according to The Guardian.

Sunak was recently censured by a UK parliament’s standards watchdog for “inadvertently” failing to properly declare his wife’s separate shareholding in a childcare company that stood to benefit from new government policy, according to The Guardian.

During his visit to attend the G20 Summit, the British PM is expected to discuss the India-UK free trade agreement in a separate bilateral meeting with his Indian counterpart, Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

One last point. The UK-India FTA negotiations have been going on for 19 months and they are in their final stages, Business Standard reported last week, citing Britain’s minister of state for trade and business, Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch. She was in India attending the G20 trade and investment ministerial in Jaipur last week.

While the British newspapers have cited experts to say that India will be pushing for a more liberalized visa and immigration regime in the UK to help its IT sector, Badenoch has clarified that visa and visa liberalisation were not part of the FTA discussions, which are focused on business mobility.