JOIN USWhen Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Make in India initiative, with an aim to boost the country’s manufacturing sector, many companies came forward with their investment plans for India.
Korean electronics major Samsung has gone a step further with its new strategy ‘Make for India’.
In an interaction with Deccan Herald, Ranjivjit Singh, Chief Marketing Officer, Samsung India, said: “We are making in India for a very long time, and we came up with the ‘Make for India’ strategy in April this year. Samsung India has been here for more than two decades, and we are here because of Indian consumers.”
“It is important to design products that are very relevant to Indian consumers. Whether the person is a housewife, student, or an enterprise worker, Samsung products are customised for users,” said the CMO, adding the company studies customer habits and how they use products so as to understand their requirements.
Samsung employs 45,000 people in India, and the India CMO said some of the sophisticated features of Samsung products are developed through the R&D (research and development) centres in India. Samsung has three R&D centres in India — Bengaluru, Noida, and Delhi — and two manufacturing units at Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, and Noida that produce the entire range of Samsung products from air conditioners, TVs, and smartphones to microwave ovens and refrigerators.
“We have 10,000 R&D engineers, and almost all of them are Indians,” he said.
Instant curd-maker a hit Instead of bringing global products and manufacturing them in India, as many companies tend to do, we look at consumer innovation, he said. To illustrate, he pointed out the company’s products such as microwave ovens that cook tandoori breads, and smartphones that understand 14 regional languages.
“We understand Indian consumers well. With humid and dusty conditions in India, washing is a big task here as people tend to soak and scrub clothes first and then put them in washing machines.”
“We have come up with machines that are designed with keeping Indian consumers in mind. Samsung washing machine is a one-stop-solution as it has built-in side water jet that gives access to water at any time. Similarly, we came up with microwave ovens that help to make tandoori roti at home, and curd-maker, which makes curd at short notice with just the press of a button. Half of our total sales come from these kinds of products,” he explained.
Recently, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao announced that Samsung has plans to invest $100 million in the state.
When asked about it, Ranjivjit Singh, however, did not comment on it, but said the company is constantly evaluating where to invest and find additional capacity.