27.6.17

Upbeat tech CEOs huddle with PM


Heaping lavish praise on PM Modi and the prospects of the Indian market, global technology chiefs like Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sundar Pichai and Cisco's John Chambers stressed how much India had helped build their businesses, and the extent to which their companies had contributed to India. After meeting Modi in Washington on Sunday, several committed to increase their engagement with India.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said Indian app developers had created almost 1,00,000 apps for the app store in 2016, up 57% over the previous year. The number of people involved in building apps on the iOS platform had touched 740,000 in India. These numbers are being disclosed for the first time. Cook said the company had started assembling iPhones in India, the first of which hit the Bengaluru market last week. “Great to see you again @narendramodi. We're inspired by your vision for India and excited about what we can achieve,“ Cook tweeted on Monday .

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has already committed over $5 billion in investment in India, tweeted soon after the meeting that he would continue to invest in the country. “Terrific meeting with Narendra Modi. Always impressed, energised by optimism and invention in India. Excited to keep investing and growing,“ he tweeted. Amazon's investments have helped it become one of the biggest e-commerce companies here. It also has a large R-D presence in India, and made significant investments last year to launch two data centres that offer cloud computing services to enterprises and startups.

Cisco chairman John Chambers described Modi as one of the world's great leaders, and said he was creating innovative outcomes for win-win partnerships between the US and India. Chambers, who is also chairman of the US-India Business Council, a business advocacy organisation, tweeted: “As chairman of the @USIBC, I believe India will move from slow follower to fast innovative leader. Tremendous in 3 yrs through Digital India.“

A combination of governmental programmes, including Digital India, Smart Cities, Startup India, and Make in India, have generated excitement among global technology players.

Many of the big technology companies, including IBM, Cisco, Accenture, and VMware, have been describing India as one of their fastest growing markets in quarterly financial results announcements in recent times. The CEOs of many technology companies have also been visiting India at increasing frequencies. On a visit in May , Oracle CEO Safra Catz described the India market as potentially the largest in the world.

Some 21 top CEOs were present at the Sunday meeting, including Google's Sundar Pichai, Adobe's Shantanu Narayen and Walmart's Doug McMillon. According to an IANS report, Pichai said Google was excited about investing in India and that US firms were looking forward to the rollout of GST.

No comments: