There’s bad news and good news for ICT-related employment in India, with Zoho holding back on plans to put money into a semiconductor facility and Rakuten boosting its investment in the country.
Indian software firm Zoho has apparently halted its year-long pursuit of a US$700 million plan to foray into chip manufacturing, having had problems finding the right technology partner to advise on the chipmaking processes.
Reuters says that Zoho, valued at around US$12 billion, offers cheaper alternatives to cloud-based software tools made by the likes of Microsoft. Its plans had included investing US$400 million in a semiconductor facility in Karnataka state in south India. It is not clear what it will do if a partner is eventually found.
This decision is bad news for the government’s aims to make India a global chip manufacturing hub. The country still has no operational chipmaking facility.
Zoho offers software and related services on subscription to businesses in 150 countries and has over 18,000 employees and more than 120 million users.
On a more upbeat note, Japan’s Rakuten which operates in sectors such as fintech, e-commerce and telecoms, aims to invest at least US$100 million and increase its headcount by 8% in India this year to strengthen its global operations, with a strong focus on using artificial intelligence to enhance operations across key areas.
The company’s India global capability centre (GCC) plays a key role in building Rakuten Pay, a major payment app in Japan, and its SixthSense platform, which is used to track the health of a system and flag issues.
Rakuten's India GCC operates about 50% of the company's 70-plus businesses, with offices at multiple locations in the country, including two centres in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru.
