Dell to Manufacture in India

Dell is planning to manufacture PCs in India, Chief Executive Officer Kevin Rollins told reporters Monday in Delhi.

Rollins did not however go into details such as the timetable for the company’s plans to manufacture in the country.

In the third quarter of last year, 1.2 million PCs were shipped in India, up by 32 percent from a year ago, according to IDC India Ltd., a market research firm in Gurgaon. Hewlett-Packard Co. sold the largest number of PCs with a market share of 19 percent, followed by HCL Infosystems Ltd., an Indian PC vendor, and Lenovo Group Ltd.

Dell also announced Monday that it will increase the number of call center staff it employs in India from 10,000 to about 15,000 over the next two years.

As part of this expansion, the company is setting up its fourth call center in India at Gurgaon near Delhi. Dell, a maker of IT products including PCs, already has call centers in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mohali.

The new center in Gurgaon will open in April, adding 700 to 1000 new staff by the end of this year, the company said.

India is the only country in Dell’s 30-site customer contact network that supports customers in all geographic regions, according to the company.

Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, opened its first global customer contact center in Bangalore in 2001. The company has also set up a product group team in Bangalore, focused on the development and testing of Dell’s enterprise line of server and storage products, and a software development center to meet Dell’s internal information systems requirements.

Dell is doubling the size of its product development group in India during the next two years, according to Rollins. Currently, more than 300 engineers are engaged in developing and testing enterprise products, including servers and storage systems, he said.

-John Ribeiro, IDG News Service