Hello and welcome to this very special broadcast right here on CNBC TV18. I'm in conversation with Mr. Palkhiwala, the CFO and the COO of Qualcomm. He's speaking to us at the new launches about what the India market represents and what the opportunities may look like going forward, a roadmap of sorts as far as Qualcomm in India in 2026 is concerned. Mr. Palkhiwala, thank you so much for hosting us. Big day today, Snapdragon for India. Tell us what's special about today, what are the big takeaways that we can walk away from after today's launch?
So first of all, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. I think we're very excited about the products we're launching. The specific announcements we're going to do is we're going to announce two new products for the smartphone industry. These are products that are very much designed with India in mind. These are global launches of these products, right? So we're launching them in India for the global market. But as I said, designed for India, designed in India, and then tremendous opportunity I think what it brings to us is taking these products and selling them globally. But I think there's a bigger story. The bigger story is really how Qualcomm is evolving. We started off as a smartphone company, but now we're the leader in automotive. We are building products for PCs. We're building products for personal AI devices like glasses and watches and hearables and other things. We are also entering robotics now. I think that's going to be one of the largest markets in the world going forward. All kinds of robotics is happening. Personal robotics, manufacturing robotics, industrial robotics, and so Qualcomm aspires to be a leader in that. And then as we've announced over the last couple of weeks, we are entering the data center chip market as well. So lots of technologies that we have really common across all these areas, and we are bringing them to bear in different markets. So that's kind of the backdrop behind product announcement.
Even as we speak, the government is contemplating, it's nearing the final stages, at least that's what officials within the government tell us on ISM 2.0, India Semiconductor Mission 2.0. They're looking at an outlay of over 1 lakh crore rupees, that would be somewhere north of 10 billion dollars that the government is looking to put out for supporting the industry. What would your expectations be from a Qualcomm, from a fabless perspective?
Yeah, so think about semiconductor in two parts, really. There's design and there's manufacturing, right? Qualcomm is obviously actively involved in design. And we have, as I said earlier, a very large team here that helps us design. The second part is manufacturing. And where we don't do the manufacturing ourselves, but we can be a very critical and important customer for the manufacturing ecosystem that gets created in India. And we've been already doing that for a while, right? So, very close relationship with the Tata Group. There are other companies that will be working with as they grow as well. But as soon as the technologies that we need are available in India, we're going to use the ecosystem that gets created. We've also been very closely partnering with the government of India, right? Giving input as the policies get finalized. Because I really do think that Qualcomm will become one of the largest customers for the manufacturing ecosystem in India and we're just at the beginning of that process.
You mentioned Qualcomm being a fabless company partnering with players like Tata's. Can you tell us when can we expect the first made in India Qualcomm chip to perhaps roll out, any indication, timelines you would want to share?
Not at this point. I think what I'll say is the manufacturing, a lot of manufacturing that Qualcomm does is incredibly advanced nodes, right? And so as those nodes get built in India with Tata and with others, we'll be standing first in line to use the capacity.
You had alluded to in the very first answer about how data center chips is one area that Qualcomm is betting big on. Tell us about that and how does that weave into the India story? In over the last few months we've seen some mammoth commitments by big hyperscalers, even Indian players as well as to the data center ecosystem. Tell us, you'll be competing with the likes of Nvidia. How does that look like? And how does the India opportunity look like with the data center boom?
Yeah, I think because we're in so many edge devices, the way we had built all of our technology is hyper high performance at low power. Right? If you think about the data centers now, one of the key problem statements is power constraints. Like data centers are being built next to power plants. And power plants are sometimes being built next to data centers so that you can have the power that's required to operate them. And so Qualcomm is going to bring its unique strength. We're building three different parts to our data center opportunity. First is a CPU chip, right? We have arguably the most high performing CPU in the world. And so we're going to bring them from edge devices to data center. Especially as this agentic transformation happens within data center, our CPU chips are going to bring the strengths that are required for agentic AI workloads in data centers. The second is AI accelerators which has been a vast majority of the market. Qualcomm, we have something called our NPU which is our neural processing unit, which is extremely high performance at low power. We're going to bring it with some novel packaging that happens with memory for a certain type of workloads. And so that's excited about that. What we also announced at our earnings a couple weeks ago is we're going to build a custom chip for a hyperscaler that will start shipping later this year. So a lot of different opportunities. We're exploring all of them at the same time. This is obviously a very, very large market with enough room for multiple players, and Qualcomm is now going to be one of the key players.
As far as the India market, again, predominantly driven by smartphones. The sales, and this is not unique to India, this is seen across a lot of major geographies as well. Flat sales, flat growth in sales, rather. Is that a challenge for you when you look at in terms of demand outlook?
You know, it's like there's two ways to look at the market. You can look at the units, or you can look at the available kind of dollars, right? And so one of the big trends that has happened in really the global market is the premiumization of smartphones. As people buy new smartphones, they're gearing up. It is becoming, if you could even imagine, it's going to become an even more important device to people's lives than it has been in the past. And so there's been consistent mix shift up within the global unit framework. And so while the total units have not grown, the amount of dollars that are available to Qualcomm has grown very significantly as a part of that process. So, we've seen the benefit of that. Our business, our revenue stream has grown a lot within phones. And so we are very strong at the top of the roadmap, premium chips. Qualcomm is by far the leader in Android, and so we're seeing the benefit of that show up. One of the metrics that I'll always remember is over the last year, there's 24% growth in India for phones over $400. Right? And so that's a pretty powerful number. I mean, that's in a flat market, when you see that kind of growth in premium devices, it shows you what the opportunity is.
