The facility, which will employ over 1,200 people once operations start, will support the wireless baseband equipment requirements of Nokia's cellphone manufacturing facility in Chennai as well as other Indian customers.
Laird is one of eight vendors catering to Nokia's equipment supply requirements for the latter's lone manufacturing facility in India.
The 1.6 lakh-sq ft manufacturing facility has been set up at an investment of over $15 million (Rs 60 crore). The facility will initially produce antennas, battery packs and EMI shielding products for cellular handset applications. The company also expects to export the products manufactured at the Chennai facility to overseas markets.
Laird Technologies presently supplies products to large Indian enterprises in the mobile phone, telecom infrastructure equipment, computer hardware and automotive electronics spaces from its manufacturing facilities outside India.
More From This Section
Laird Technologies India managing director, Talpallikar, said that besides availability of a skilled workforce and support from the Tamil Nadu government, good logistics and infrastructure facilities, and lower costs were key reasons for choosing Chennai to set up Laird's first offshore location in India.
He added that with the setting up of the manufacturing facility in Chennai, Laird is poised to aggressively expand its customer base in India over the next 12-18 months.
St Louis-headquartered Laird Technologies is a unit of UK-based Laird Group Plc and employs over 14,000 employees across 40 facilities in 14 countries.
It designs and supplies customised products for wireless and other advanced electronics applications, and is establishing a growing position in the design and supply of complete radio frequency (RF) modules and systems.
Besides telecommunications, data transfer and information technology, the company supplies to the automotive, aerospace, defence, consumer, medical, and industrial sectors.