BENGALURU: SaaS unicorn Zoho Corp’s CEO and co-founder Sridhar Vembu on Wednesday said the company is not directly involved in the semiconductor venture and it is only an investor in Silectric Semiconductor Manufacturing, which is awaiting clearance from the government.
“Zoho has no expertise in the area (semiconductor). We know software, technology... We don’t know about semiconductors, that’s why we are only an investor and the application is still pending,” he told TNIE.
This clarification comes days after reports suggested Zoho’s semiconductor venture will come up in Odisha. “The government is evaluating the proposals critically in terms of what technologies are brought in, who is providing those technologies, long-term prospects of those companies...these questions must be asked and I am glad the government is asking these questions.
We are not yet sure that we will be among the selected approved applicants and only after that can we even comment on the location,” he explained.
Once Silectric receives clearance it would build semiconductors for power electronics. Vembu’s two classmates, and a couple of more people have been onboarded for this venture. Speaking about data centres, Vembu said they will cover every country and so far they have 18 data centres.
Zoho, which has two data centres in India-Mumbai and Chennai, is also looking for additional locations, mostly rural locations closer to where its customers are. The Chennai-headquartered tech company on Wednesday announced its foray into the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) network.
It launched a seller app Vikra on the ONDC network and going forward, it also plans to launch a buyer app on the network. It also announced on the sidelines of Zoholics India, its annual user conference, the launch of Zoho IoT, a low-code IoT platform.
Vembu also expects India to be the company's largest market in terms of revenue in another ten years. Currently, India is the company’s second largest after the US. “New vendors do very well in the growing market as new customers are easier to persuade,” Vembu said, adding that he is also bullish on Global Capability Centre’s (GCC) boom in the country. In 2023, Zoho saw a customer growth of 31% in India.
Talking about Vikra, Zoho’s global head of finance and operations Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran highlighted the scope of the country’s ecommerce market as at present ecommerce penetration in the retail segment is only 6-7%.