India needs skills, infrastructure to be world class supplier

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 to US universities. They said he 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."

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 boot up times and instant access.

Mehrotra says solid state drives in computing 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.

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.