India's economy, now with muscle
Long considered a dead end for manufacturing, India's economy is now headed to the factory floor.
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SRIPERUMBUDUR, INDIA –
For a decade, India's economy has played the same hit song, stuck on repeat: The service sector - anchored by information technology - generates 50 percent of the nation's wealth. Meanwhile, manufacturing has been dismissed with a snort. India was too inefficient, too bureaucratic, too underdeveloped.
Now, that is changing.
Boosted by the country's growing appetite for global goods, companies ranging from Honda to Hewlett-Packard are bringing new assembly lines to India. Manufacturing grew 11.3 percent in the first quarter of this fiscal year, spurring the country's highest first- quarter growth this decade: 8.9 percent.
The old problems persist, and India is nowhere near ready to displace China as the world's factory floor. But in a nation where 250 million people live on less than $1 a day, it offers a hope that high tech cannot: that India may begin to spread its newfound prosperity beyond a small, urban middle class.
Here outside Chennai, amid a thicket of thatched-roof huts, two factories - one for Nokia and the other for Korean automaker Hyundai - suggest what is possible, even in a country short on power, pitted by potholes, and still under the economic sway of Karl Marx.
"Can manufacturing work in India?" asks Jukka Lehtelä, director of Nokia's India operations, as the footsteps of arriving workers rattle ceiling light fixtures. "Anyone who could see behind these walls would not ask that question."
While the scene outside is timeless India, with workers filing by wearing saris so bright they could be plugged into a light socket, behind these walls is something new: the whirring and clicking of clockwork cellphone construction. By design, the factory floor is organized with the same Scandinavian orderliness that characterizes every Nokia plant - from its domestic factory in Finland to others in China, Texas, and beyond.
It is at least a start. While manufacturing is 55 percent of China's gross domestic product, it is only about 17 percent of India's - so it has often been overlooked. "In the 1990s, we lost sight of manufacturing as a sector," says Ramesh Mangaleswaran of the Mumbai (Bombay) office of McKinsey & Co., an international consulting firm.
For one, the brightness of the service sector eclipsed manufacturing. But there was also a lack of will to put in the work needed to make manufacturing viable in India.
Indian-made goods were expensive because of high taxation - the legacy of India's bygone socialist era.
Likewise, the country undercut its advantage of low-cost labor with strict labor policies - such as one law that requires companies with more than 100 employees to get permission from the state government before laying off workers.
Lastly, India's roads and power grids were ill-equipped to handle the strain of a manufacturing economy, with its sorties of multiton trucks and a thirst for uninterrupted electricity.
By and large, the problems remain. There is progress, as the government amends the tax code and establishes special industrial zones with better infrastructure, tax breaks, and - in some cases - more flexible labor laws. But Chinese goods are still 30 percent cheaper, and China still has seven times the highway miles, by some calculations.
The great incentive nowadays is the Indian market itself. Domestic demand, not exports, is the real engine behind India's growth.
It is the world's fastest-growing cellphone market, with more than 1 million phones sold every week. By 2016, auto sales here could more than quadruple, to $145 billion, the government estimates. And Indians will buy 5.6 million computers this fiscal year - 1 million more than last fiscal year, according to Dell Computers.
So it is no mystery why Samsung and Motorola, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard are setting up Indian factories. For its part, Nokia considered building a plant here in 1995 and again in 2001. But the time wasn't right until 2004.
"It's like a hockey stick," says the Finn, Mr. Lehtelä, casting his mind back to things more familiar than cows and curry. "[The market] was very, very low for many years, and now it starts to go up."
Yet it is the growth of a domestic Indian auto market that most clearly presages India's manufacturing potential. In the past few weeks, automakers have piled into India like clowns into a Volkswagen.
• Honda announced its intention to triple its car sales to 150,000 by 2010, and it is in talks to build a second India plant near New Delhi.
• Toyota and Daihatsu will invest $86 million in a Bangalore plant to build 100,000 cars annually, ramping up to 200,000 by 2010.
• General Motors has decided to spend $300 million for a second plant that would raise its Indian capacity to 140,000 cars a year, from 60,000.
• German automakers Volkswagen and BMW are building their first factories in India.
In each case - except with luxury carmaker BMW - the primary goal is a better share of India's small-car market, which makes up 70 percent of auto sales here. Each major car company now needs to have an "India plan" - and in many ways, Hyundai is the foreign carmaker furthest down that road.
Trial and error for Hyundai
When it opened its plant in 1998, Hyundai was one of the first foreign brands to commit to India. Along the way to building up an 18.5 percent market share - good enough to be India's No. 2 brand - Hyundai has had to deal with all the frustrations that India has to offer.
The roads and congestion are so bad that it takes seven days for trucks to get Hyundai cars from here to New Delhi - roughly the same distance as Miami to Boston. It takes three to four hours just to get to the port 20 miles away. The state government promised to build a highway between Sriperumbudur and the port 10 years ago, but it is still not finished.
While Hyundai has a special power line from the government that promises uninterrupted electricity, at least one nearby supplier relies 100 percent on its own generators.
"We have experienced trial and error," says Heung Soo Lheem, managing director of Hyundai's India operations.
For example, he sees a large number of malnourished workers, meaning that they are weaker than workers in other plants. Moreover, there are unusually high absentee rates, and not just due to illness. "People will travel two or three days by train to go to a marriage," says Mr. Lheem.
Yet the bottom line is good: "The efficiency is not as good as in Korea, but it still has competitiveness," says Lheem, noting India's lower wages. "Our Indian operation is very much successful at this point."
Then he adds pointedly: "Even more so than our Chinese operations."
Indeed, the factory at Sriperumbudur is a plot of perfect Korean efficiency transplanted to the scrub of the south Indian plains - right down to the
kimchi in the executive cafeteria. The factory's 9,000 employees, contractors, and apprentices split three eight-hour shifts - the only plant in Hyundai's worldwide network to be online 24 hours a day. In addition, the workers handle different car models on the same assembly line, shifting seamlessly between Santros, Sonatas, and the other four models Hyundai makes here.
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