NEW DELHI, India – January 16, 2017 – MediaTek Inc. today announced its “Smartphone Design Training Program” created to accelerate the “Make in India” initiative has concluded successfully. MediaTek has developed this training program to foster and educate talent for India’s fast-growing handset industry, by sharing its smartphone expertise and knowledge with a group of handpicked senior managers and engineers from the smartphone industry in India.
This industry's first training program is designed to help the Indian government address the strong demand for smartphone design talent and supply the necessary skills. It also creates a platform for MediaTek and its global ecosystem partners to collaborate with Indian companies and build closer partnerships to create new, Indian designed products for its home market.
The training program’s closing ceremony was held at the MediaTek Headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan on 13th January. Ms. Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary of MeitY, joined the ceremony via video conference and recognized historical value of the training program to foster talent for India. MediaTek Chairman and CEO, Mr. Ming-Kai Tsai congratulated all participants who completed the training in person, along with Mr. Ming-Ji Wu, Director General of Industrial Development Bureau at MOEA.
Mr. Sridharan Madhusudhanan, Director General, India Taipei Association and Mr. Gince Kuruvilla Mattam, Deputy Director General, India Taipei Association also attended the function and interacted with the participating Taiwanese companies and Indian engineers.
Over the past six weeks (*1), the training focused on providing:
- In-depth training program covering all aspects towards the theory of product design and hands-on experience building smartphones from scratch.
- Overview of all key hardware design domains including system design, RF, connectivity and multimedia, 12 MediaTek partners, who are major component makers within the handset ecosystem joined to deliver wider knowledge to participants.
- Soft-skills helping participants to lead a team for efficient execution of handset projects.
Forty-two Indian engineers joined the program in Taiwan for the training who are now industry ready to work on live handset design projects. The participants represent twenty-two leading Indian companies including well-known smartphone brands Micromax, Videocon, Lava and Intex.
MediaTek collaborates with the smartphone global ecosystem to provide an unprecedented opportunity, where key component companies came together to share knowledge of their specialized domains. These partners included (*2) Airoha, Anritsu, Ilitek, Keysight, Liteon, Litepoint, RichTek, Rohde & Schwarz, Sporton, TXC Corporation, Unimicron and Winbond.
Read more about the program specifics and participant experiences at http://i.mediatek.com/makeinindia.
Supporting Quotes
“The pilot phase of our smartphone training program has successfully completed, however, this is not the end, but rather a new beginning of the journey. MediaTek and its partners in the smartphone supply chain will continue to collaborate with India, and support its industry to build a complete mobile ecosystem. I hope to see all the participants fully utilize what they have learnt in Taiwan to bring new handsets to the Indian market in the near future,” said, MediaTek Chairman and CEO, Mr. Ming-Kai Tsai.
“MediaTek is one of the leaders in smartphone area coming forward to exchange their knowledge and solutions with Indian engineers. This training program is going to be one of the key building blocks in establishing India as a manufacturer and designer of electronics products going forward,” said Ms. Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary of MeitY. “I would like to express our greatest appreciation to MediaTek and Chairman Tsai, I am sure that there will be many programs where India and Taiwan will collaborate in years to come. However, this program will be the historical one as it is the first, unique initiative helped to narrow the existing talent gap in India industry, ” added by Ms. Aruna Sundararajan.
“With the government’s leadership, Taiwanese companies have invested over US$6 billion to support the “Make in India” initiative in the past years and have become a trust-worthy partner for India. The MediaTek’s smartphone training program further helped bring Taiwanese expertise in design and manufacturing of electronics products to India, creating a win-win situation leveraging the strengths of both countries. Taiwan’s active promotion of the New Southbound Policy encourages collaboration between Taiwanese and Indian industries. We hope to see this program continue in the future,” said Mr. Ming-Ji Wu, Director General of Industrial Development Bureau at MOEA.
"We, as a nation, are very determined to have a strong domestic manufacturing industry and welcome all foreign investors, especially from Taiwan, to bring in the culture of excellence. This program is the first step towards ensuring the right pool of local talent are skilled to execute handset design from India, and we thank all the involved entities for their support to fulfil this requirement," said Mr Pankaj Mahindroo, Founder and National President of Indian Cellular Association. "We have some big gaps to fill before achieving the production target of 500mn units by 2020 and 1.2bn units by 2025, and look forward to continued support from MediaTek and Taiwan industry to help meet this aim."
“It has been a wonderful experience to participate in this program. Over the past 6 weeks, I have been able to learn from and interact with experts from all sub-domains in the handset industry as a part of our training module and theory classes,” said Gyaneshwar Patel, Assistant General Manager - Quality, at Mircomax. “It was truly a great opportunity for me where I could directly attain insights from all key component makers and dig deeper into their specialized segments. This knowledge will be quite helpful in executing live projects once we rejoin the industry,” he added.
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Note
*1: This is two and half months training program includes traveling and learning for one and half month in Taiwan followed by one month of training over weekends via video conference in India.
*2: The following companies are listed in alphabetical order.
About MediaTek MediaTek Incorporated (TWSE: 2454) is a global fabless semiconductor company that enables 1.5 billion connected devices a year. We are a market leader in developing innovative systems-on-chip (SoC) for mobile device, home entertainment, connectivity and IoT products. Our dedication to innovation has positioned us as a driving market force in several key technology areas, including highly power-efficient mobile technologies and advanced multimedia solutions across a broad range of products such as smartphones, tablets, digital televisions, OTT boxes, wearables and automotive solutions. MediaTek empowers and inspires people to expand their horizons and more easily achieve their goals through smart technology. We call this idea Everyday Genius and it drives everything we do. Visit www.mediatek.com for more information.