TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ MONDAY, MARCH 07, 2005 01:11:45 AM]
Craig Barrett is sanguine about Intel but suffering for the United States. The CEO of America's famed chip company, weeks from stepping down after 17 years at the helm, is sounding an alarm that is more urgent than Intel's signature sound: Watch out for China and India; they are out to eat America's lunch.
"I lead a schizophrenic existence," Barrett explained in an engaging conversation with your correspondent and a Chinese journalist on the margins of the Intel Development Forum in San Francisco last week. "Intel will go where it will find talent. But I worry for the United States and I worry for my grandchildren."
For several months now, Barrett, Bill Gates, and other tech titans of America have been crying hoarse about the coming of the Asian century and the possible eclipse of America. China and India, says Barrett, are expanding their university-level math, science and engineering programs at a pace comparable to US after World War II. Asian colleges now produce six times the number of engineering degrees produced in the US. For the first time, other nations are about to produce more patents per year than the US.
"If the world's best engineers are produced in India or Singapore, that is where our companies will go," Barrett says without batting an eyelid. "This is the reality in the modern world. We locate facilities where we can find or import talent."
Which is why, already, India has become Intel's third largest stomping ground - after the United States, where it employs over 50,000 people, and Israel, where it has nearly 5000 - and is ramping up at speed. Intel's India head count has already crossed 2000, not counting the thousands who work in Intel facilities in 45 countries, a prevalence that had led to the insider joke "Intel Outside, Patel Inside."
Intel is so upbeat about the India operation that the expectation now is it will set up a fabrication plant there, a $ 2 billion call, which if it fructifies, will be the single biggest foreign investment after Enron's disastrous Dabhol power plant.
But Barrett declines to answer the $2 billion question, although company insiders acknowledge that there have been in-house discussions on the possibility. It is a call that has to be made by Barrett's successor Paul Otellini.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1042817.cms