Qualcomm looks to make India its top market; to expand focus into smart glasses, automotives

Qualcomm has long been diversifying across verticals and is expanding its footprint across geographies as well. Speaking to Fortune India on the sidelines of the first Snapdragon Auto Day, Savi Soin, president, Qualcomm India, shared that the company is investing heavily in India, with the aim of making it the top market for Qualcomm’s global portfolio.

“There's nobody touching that level of diversification with the Indian mindset. My dream is that India designs more products as they're doing like this. The more India designs, the more valuable we will be. Dream is that products are designed, manufactured and consumed here and shipped globally,” says Soin.

While Qualcomm continues to strengthen its revenue from smartphones, Soin says that the company is equally focussed on building smart glasses and automotives as an equally strong vertical in India due to the growing Gen Z population and premiumisation trend.

"Indian users are wanting more premium automotive experience"

While Qualcomm already works with most legacy 4-wheeler OEMs, which includes names like Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M), and Tata Motors, only recently the semiconductor company partnered with M&M for the latter’s BE SUVs that feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon Digital Chassis solutions, including the Snapdragon Cockpit Platform and Snapdragon Auto 5G Modem-RF solution.

“The Mahindra partnership is going great. It is just the beginning. They're realising what we could do together, especially with our development teams very close by. That partnership went really well,” says Soin, hinting that more is to come.

Earlier, Nakul Duggal, Group GM, Automotive and Industrial & Embedded IoT, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. had also revealed that by the next year, an Indian OEM will deploy its latest Snapdragon Flex System on Chip (SoC). Soin also revealed that other OEMs are also in active conversations for further engagements of the same level.

“Automotive is going to be very big as India goes towards more software-defined vehicles, V2X becomes very important, more AI, more compute, and Indian users are wanting more premium experience,” Soin adds.

With as many as 2 billion vehicles on the roads across the globe, Qualcomm Technologies powers 350 million vehicles worldwide. The company did not reveal the number of Indian vehicles that are powered by the company’s technology solutions.

Soin said that the reason the partnership with Indian OEMs has been made possible now is because there has been an active interest shown from the automakers side.

“They said, “bring your ecosystem to India, don't want to go to China, don't want to go to Germany.” I see a very focused approach on solving German problems or Chinese problems, let's do an India one. So that's what we're doing in India, one where we're bringing select partners that can solve Indian problems. We want Indian Tier one (automakers) to innovate,” says Soin.

For now, the work for Soin and co. here in India is cut out – to focus on building solutions for Indian problem statements while keeping their global application in mind.

“India now has become an innovation hub for us. We have innovation hubs around the world…in San Diego, in Israel and Munich and other places. India is a very important area for us to solve problems. The reason why we're doing for India is a lot of the innovation that we're bringing for India on say fixed wireless or automotive, have applicability elsewhere. Like maybe in Africa or in Latin America, we're really investing because we have R&D teams here,” says Soin.