VVDN to expand ops globally by next year

livemint.com:

₹250 crore fund-raising led by the investment arm of brokerage firm Motilal Oswal on 7 September for the third time after infusing ₹350 crore in April, and ₹250 crore in January 2020. While Bansal did not divulge the names of firms it is in talks with for smartphone manufacturing, he said its phone assembly business may begin with existing clients from other product categories. Its global expansion is driven by the need to meet regulations across geographies, and to reduce shipping times to global markets.

“We need to have a manufacturing facility within US soil if we cater to products for the US Defense sector. But, while ‘make in India’ is our focus, there is a ‘local for local’ trend globally—Europe wants products to be made within Europe itself. The middle-East wants something similar, so this is another market that we’re looking out for," Bansal said.

VVDN’s largest revenue share comes from its original design offerings to brands, which the Centre is also pushing for. On Friday, union communications and IT minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said at a roundtable that local design “creates the real value addition of nearly 40-50% on local manufacturing." Bansal, too, agreed, adding, “In China, for any product category, the entire BOM can be procured locally. If I have to do that in India, we need to build all of this capacity here.

In many cases, companies are still taking CKD and SKD-driven approaches, which seems very short-term. Such manufacturing won’t survive in the long term, unless someone holds design IPs. The next step has to be to build an ecosystem of components here—that’s where we need entrepreneurs to come in." As a contract manufacturer, VVDN competes with the likes of Dixon Technologies.