What is the market potential for providing services to the Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment Industry from India?
Surjit Lahiri: The potential is huge. The projected annual sales revenue of the semiconductor manufacturing industry for 2007 is $41.5 billion. With approx 15-20% spent traditionally on R&D, and with 5% of R&D allocated to outsourced Semiconductor tool equipment software, the global market is estimated to be around $300 million. Frost & Sullivan: What are the challenges faced by the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry? Surjit Lahiri: In the highly cyclical and competitive SEMI industry, Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment companies and Semiconductor Wafer Fabrication plants (FABs) are facing a daunting task to stay profitable. Companies in this sector need to continually provide feature enhancements to their existing products or create new markets with new products to increase or sustain their market share. Effectively scaling up/down the resources in line with the desired bandwidth needed to deliver on time is one of the biggest challenges faced by Semiconductor manufacturing equip
