German semiconductor giant Infineon Technologies is looking to double its India headcount to 5,000 employees in the next five years, focusing primarily on research and development, even as the company has no immediate plans of committing to manufacturing in India, a top company official said Tuesday.
Andreas Urschitz, CMO and management board member at Infineon, said that the company currently has 2,500 employees in India, working on R&D, which the company aims to double by 2030. Infineon has more than 58,000 employees worldwide, with most of them based in the APAC region. The company is a major player in supplying chips to the automobile industry.
“We are doing lots of innovation in India and intend to heavily invest and grow our R&D base here…in terms of our long-term planning towards 2030, we intend to double the number of people in India,” he told reporters.
However, he also clarified that Infineon has no near-term plans of setting up a manufacturing base in India, but did not rule out the possibility in the future, depending on how the country’s semiconductor ecosystem shapes up, and geopolitical factors.
This means that the company is unlikely to participate in the $10 billion India Semiconductor Mission, under which the government has so far attracted investment worth $18 billion. The Tata-PSMC fab, being built at a cost of roughly $11 billion, is among the five semiconductor projects the government has greenlit under the India Semiconductor Mission. Apart from the fab, four assembly and testing plants by US-based Micron Technology, the Tatas, Murugappa Group’s CG Power in partnership with Japan’s Renesas, and Kaynes Semicon, are also under construction.
Instead, the company will focus on local partnerships in the country. It recently announced an agreement with Mohali-based CDIL Semiconductors, under which Infineon will supply bare die wafers to CDIL, which the latter will package into discrete and module semiconductor products for Indian customers and sell it under the CDIL brand.
Urschitz also revealed that Infineon has signed a similar agreement with Kaynes Semicon.
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The government is currently working on the contours of the second phase of the India Semiconductor Mission, with the design and outline of the scheme finalised and discussions with the industry underway, IT Secretary S Krishnan had said earlier this month.
Krishnan said that under the second phase of the ISM, the government will look to provide some support to raw materials, equipment, gases and speciality chemicals needed in semiconductor manufacturing.
Last August, The Indian Express had reported that the Centre had created a fresh $15 billion blueprint for the second phase of the India Semiconductor Mission. Under the renewed scheme, the government was planning to offer capital support for raw materials and gases used in chip manufacturing, this paper had reported. The first phase had an outlay of $10 billion, and was approved in December 2021 to kickstart India’s chip industry.
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