computer manufacturer

From the time he was in high school in New Delhi’s Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, Sanjay Mehrotra was clear that he wanted to go to the US. In 1974, the system involved only 11 years of schooling, and US universities told him he needed to do 12 before he could apply. So he joined BITS, Pilani. At the end of the first year at BITS, he applied again US universities. They said could come as a freshman but he could not get credits for his year at BITS. He declined, and reapplied in the second year. This time, University of California, Berkeley, gave him admission with full two years’ credit in the electrical engineering and computer sciences programme. He joined, went on to do a Masters at Berkeley, and then worked for four Silicon Valley semiconductor companies, including Intel, between 1980 and 1988. Mehrotra was working specifically in the then nascent area of what is known as flash memory — the storage technology that involves no moving parts and where the chip retains the stored information even when its power source is removed. In 1988, Eli Harari, a former Intel colleague, approached him with the idea of founding a company focused on flash memory, and that’s what they did later that year, together with Jack Yuan, a colleague of Harari’s in Hughes Microelectronics. “We believed that in the future there would be applications that would need flash storage,” Mehrotra told us on a visit to Bangalore recently. “And 25 years ago, when we founded the company, we had said in one of our publications that in the future there would be phones like cellular phones and light computing devices that would need this technology.”computer parts suppliers That proved prophetic. Flash memory is today ubiquitous — it’s the memory that is used in cellphones, digital cameras, USB drives, external hard drives, set-top boxes, tablets and increasingly in servers and PCs (traditional servers and PCs run on hard disk drives that have spinning disks and other mechanical/moving parts and are therefore more prone to disruptions and higher energy consumption). With flash memory’s success, the company they founded — SanDisk — became a household name, and last year had revenues of $5.7 billion. “Globally and in India, we have a third of the retail market in flash products,” says Mehrotra. SanDisk’s early success was with camera makers. Cameras then used chemical films. “We worked with Kodak, Nikon, Polaroid and converted the industry to digital film,” says Mehrotra. Then came USB flash drives that toppled the floppy disc drives industry. And then flash in audio players and mobile devices. These have made countries like India particularly important for SanDisk. “Just look at India: Half the population is less than 25 years old and a big chunk of it is tech-savvy, digital media-savvy. They know how to use these things better than you and I, and they are much faster at it. They are capturing more data, sharing more data, they want to be able to access their data fast and anytime, anywhere. That’s driving increased local storage in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets,” says Mehrotra. Within Asia, India and China are SanDisk’s fastest growing retail markets. The big push now is into laptops and enterprise servers, where solid state drives based on flash technology is replacing traditional spinning hard disk drives. Flash is enabling sleeker, lighter, more power-efficient and reliable laptops. Flash is also faster, giving fast bootcomputer manufacturer up times and instant access. Mehrotra says solid state drives in computing is the biggest growth driver for the flash industry and for SanDisk. Prices of solid state drives are still high, so last year only about 10% of the notebook computers had such drives in them. Estimates are that in another three years, about one-third of notebooks will have solid state drives in them. “But I won’t be surprised if the penetration rate is even higher by then,” says Mehrotra. All MacBook Air laptops and many of Intel’s ultrabooks today come with solid state drives. SanDisk’s Bangalore R&D centre, which has 350 engineers, or more than a tenth of its global R&D strength, works on the design of memory chips and controllers that go into flash memory products, as also on software development. It is integral to SanDisk’s operations.laptop manufacturers Would the company now be willing to do some manufacturing in India? The question was repeatedly put to Mehrotra during his Bangalore visit, given the Indian government’s recent push for electronics manufacturing. Mehrotra, who became SanDisk’s CEO on January 1, 2011, when Harari retired, would only reply that the company’s plants in Japan and China were currently sufficient. Is manufacturing in India a challenge? Mehrotra says the most important things are to make sure that the skilled resource pool is available, and that the infrastructure and the ecosystem needed to become a world-class supplier is there. “I can see that India is working towards attaining that,” he says.

Dell plans to sell computer plants worldwide

Dell Inc is seeking to sell all of its manufacturing plants worldwide and has approached contract computer manufacturers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The proposed factory sales, intended to slash costs, mark a significant shift from Dell’s long-standing strategy of making its own products, the Journal said. Instead, Dell plans to have contract manufacturers make all its computers, the paper reported. Dell, the world’s second-biggest maker of personal computers, is seeking to raise profitability after reporting earnings that missed analysts’ estimates as it cut prices to take market share from industry leader Hewlett-Packard Co. computer parts suppliers Selling its production sites to focus on sales and marketing may aid efforts by the Round Rock, Texas-based company to expand its product range. “As the company moves away from its direct sales business model, it needs to offer a wider range of products and respond more quickly to market demand,” said Wang Wanli, a technology analyst at HSBC Holdings Plc in Taipei. computer parts suppliers “Outsourcing production to third-party manufacturers will help them become more flexible.” Dell would ensure that any contract manufacturer who purchased a factory would agree to make hardware for the company, according to the Journal report. indian manufacturersDell may sell all of its plants within 18 months, the newspaper said. Last month, Dell introduced new notebooks with longer battery life aimed at business users. The company also started selling a slimmer laptop weighing 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) after Hewlett-Packard offered a similar model in June. Now available in stores Dell, which in 2007 abandoned selling PCs only via telephone and the Internet, has forged agreements to sell its computers through retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc in the US, Gome Electrical Appliance Holdings in China, Carrefour SA in Europe, Bic Camera in Japan, and the Croma chain of electronics stores of India’s Tata group. T R Reid, a Singapore-based Dell spokesman for Asia Pacific and Japan, declined to comment on the report, citing company policy not to comment on speculation. “We have said repeatedly there are opportunities to use third-party manufacturers to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” Reid said. Determining “how best to do that is something that is in process now.” Dell increased PC shipments 21% in the quarter ended June 30, compared with Hewlett-Packard’s 17%, and 15% for the market overall, according to research company IDC. BLOOMBERG

It’s Touch-and-Go for PC Makers as Sales Go South

Leading personal computer makers are attempting to win back consumer attention that has lately shifted to tablets and smartphones by betting on a new breed of devices that respond to touch. Computer System Manufacturers
From US-headquartered Hewlett Packard and Dell to Asian majors Acer and Lenovo, top PC makers see touch-based laptops and hybrid devices that double up as tablets as a means to counter the slowing sales of desktops and laptops.
The change in tactic is also a tacit admission by these companies that emerging markets like India may not be able to throw them a lifeline in the wake of shrinking PC sales in United States and Europe. “On one side the PC market is not expanding, while on the other side more and more people are getting used to the touch interface. The question is, ‘Do you want to complain or do something about it?’” P Krishnakumar, executive director and head of consumer business at Dell India, says.
In 2012, India’s PC market grew at a tardy 3.5% to 11 million units from 10.5 million units in the previous year. During the same period, smartphone shipments in the country grew 48% to 16.3 million units. The Round Rock, Texas-based Dell, which counts India as one of its fastest growing markets, is now running a marketing campaign in schools in the country’s smaller towns to push touch-screen laptops to students and parents. Last month, Palo Alto, California-based HP launched six new touch-responsive computers in India making it the new battleground for PC vendors.
“We expect to see a growing trend towards a multi-use environment where customers want access to multiple devices, form factors, operating systems and ecosystems,” Ketan Patel, director of HP’s consumer products business in India, says.Computer System Manufacturers He says the Indian PC market is going through a phase of “form factor flux” where the dominant form factor of future is yet to emerge. Analysts say they expect touch-screen usage to increase in emerging markets such as India, Indonesia and Brazil where PC penetration is low and that these devices will give tablets such as Apple’s iPad a run for their money even though the overall PC sales would not soar.
“Touch will bring interest back to the PC market but overall volumes will not increase but steady the decline,” says Ranjit Agarwal, research director at technology research firm Gartner’s global forecasting team in the UK. He says emerging markets will not have any problem in adopting touch as many users are yet to experience premium phones like an iPhone yet.
Component and chipmakers too have spotted this trend.laptop manufacturer. The world’s largest chipmaker Intel, which recently cut its sales outlook following weak PC sales, said the distance between devices traditionally meant for content creation (laptops/desktops) and consumption (smartphones/tablets) is blurring in markets like India. “We feel touch is at a tipping point,” Ramaprasad Srinivasan, a director at Intel India, said last month. In May, Intel started a nation-wide campaign in schools to raise awareness about PCs among students, hoping to push sales.
Device makers are also particular about launching their new touch-based computers at affordable prices to make them accessible to a broader base of consumers.