"Our evolution will be similar to the evolution of Taiwan," said Ramesh Emani, president of Embedded & Product Engineering Solutions at Wipro, noting that in India, there would be greater emphasis on hardware design than on manufacturing.
As was the case in China, domestic demand is a significant factor in India's technological expansion.
India has only 100 million phones for its population of 1 billion people — including both cellular and land lines — but that number is expected to grow to 250 million in the next two years. Cellular service costs only about $4 to $7 a month, and future phones will also sport cricket scores, lottery ticket purchases and other types of services seen in the rest of the world.
"The volume is enormous," said Sanjay Nayak, chief executive of network equipment specialist Tejas Networks, which has won large contracts in India against multinational competitors.
High growth is also expected for the computer market in India, which counts only 14 PCs for every 1,000 people. Several companies hope to court that market with computers priced at less than $250, many of them packaged with residential broadband service that costs about $12 a month for a 128kbps connection.
"It is our fastest-growing emerging market," said Ketan Sampat, president of Intel India. "We've had a growing middle class. PCs are part of that."
Beyond the home, some hardware companies are targeting the enterprise market in and outside India. VXL Instruments, for example, delivers stripped-down desktops to the likes of Air France and Goodyear Tire & Rubber.
New Delhi's FinalQuadrant Solutions sells a server appliance for the travel industry. Travel agents pay only a modest amount for the server but hand FinalQuadrant a small fee for each hotel room night or travel leg booked through the system.
"We're making every single (travel) reseller as powerful as Expedia," CEO Anuj Gupta said. The company, which made $1m in net profit in 2004, has mostly sold its products in Europe and is expanding to the United States.
