US-based chip major Qualcomm said it is investing heavily in its support partners to bring to fruition its plans to move module production to India.
Known for its highly efficient Snapdragon chips, the company has been especially bullish in designing chipset platform for telematics, infotainment and driver assistance, including ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) for electric vehicles (EVs).
The firm has now set its eyes on localising automotive module production in India, which has a substantial domestic footprint encompassing both domestic and global automakers that manufacture locally, it says.
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Nakul Duggal, the Group General Manager for automotive, industrial, and embedded IoT, Qualcomm Technologies, said the company is investing heavily in its top-tier ecosystem partners to move manufacturing into India.
“We build a lot of modules. Those modules are typically built in Taiwan, or China, or Korea, but we are now actively working in India to localise this. We, of course, partner with our tier-1 ecosystem, such that as they move their manufacturing to India. Qualcomm is a fabless company, which means it designs the chips but doesn’t manufacture them,” he said.
Qualcomm has approximately 22,000 employees, or 60 per cent of its workforce, in India, and a local team to support domestic car manufacturers.
"For us, it's really about being able to create opportunities in our supply chain to be able to direct that (manufacture)," Duggal added, and reasoned that building an automotive product for the local market will generate a competitive advantage, a trend that China has benefitted greatly from.
Qualcomm has partnered with all the major car OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), including Tata Motors, Mahindra, Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai, to provide them with chipsets for modernising cars.
Duggal also informed the media that the company’s Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite SoC (System on Chip), which were announced in October 2024 and delivered to customers in early 2025, will probably be deployed in a dozen vehicles in 2026.
The company has set a target to double the total revenue from the automotive business to about USD 8 billion by 2029.
The automotive segment of the company accounts for around 10 per cent of its global revenue, which is around USD 3.6 billion to USD 3.8 billion.
"There is a huge need for building products that cater to the needs of the Indian region. Rather than bringing in a product that is built for a global customer, build a product for a local customer. That necessitates for an OEM the need to have engineering capability, creative capability, to actually think about the needs of the local region, and we are starting to see that happen," Duggal said.
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