Foxconn Chairman Young Liu recently met Akarsh Hebbar, Vedanta Group’s Global Managing Director of Display & Semiconductor Business, in New Delhi, to discuss next steps for their proposed partnership to manufacture semiconductor chips in India.
It may be recalled that Vedanta and Foxconn signed an MoU in February this year to form a joint venture company in India. Vedanta will hold 60 per cent of the equity in the JV while Foxconn will own the remaining 40 per cent.
The joint venture between the two companies will support Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of creating an ecosystem for electronics manufacturing in India. The Vedanta-Foxconn partnership will, in the coming years, arrest India’s electronic component import bill that currently stands at around $100 billion per year.
This is the first joint venture in the electronics manufacturing space after the announcement of the Government’s Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for semiconductors and display manufacturing. Vedanta is planning to invest around $15 billion in a phase-wise manner over the next 5-10 years to build displays and semiconductor chips in India. The JV will look at setting up a semiconductor manufacturing plant in the next two years. The two partners are in discussion with some state governments, to finalize the location of semiconductor unit soon.