Texas-based National Instruments (NI) sees huge business opportunity coming from the Indian defence and space research establishments with the removal of export restrictions on four subsidiaries each of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) by the US government.
“We see 100 per cent opportunity when everything opens up,” Solaikutty Dhanabal, academic director of NI Systems (India) Private Limited, told Business Standard on the sidelines of a road show on aerospace and defence sectors organised here by the company.
NI manufactures hardware and software products used in industrial automation, automated test equipment, embedded systems, and test and measurement applications. Its sales revenues from India predominantly come from energy, infrastructure and automotive sectors.
The company is currently working with some wings of DRDO and Isro, such as National Remote Sensing Agency in Hyderabad, which are out of the purview of trade restrictions, apart from working closely with Council of Scientific and Indian Research (CSIR) labs among others, according to Solaikutty.
Like many other US companies, NI also could not sell its products that are of dual use to the organisations on the entity list, he said.
The four DRDO subsidiaries are Armament Research and Development Establishment, Defence Research and Development Lab (DRDL), Missile Research and Development Complex and Solid State Physics Laboratory. Isro subsidiaries are Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, Solid Propellant Space Booster Plant, Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota (SHAR), and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre apart from Bharat Dynamics Limited, which produces missiles and munitions for the country's defence forces.
While NI is growing 100 per cent in India, a significant part of it will now come from defence and aerospace sectors, Solaikutty said.
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Anant K Sinha, director, Infinity Microsystems, one of the vendors to DRDO, said though the lifting of trade restrictions might allow companies like NI to directly deal with defence research establishments, the role of vendors would still be significant.
NI offers four technology platforms -- three hardware and the fourth one being the company's flagship LabVIEW software, whose applications range from simple data acquisition to complex embedded systems. These products can be customised for a variety of usages, including cellphone testing and structural health monitoring among other things, said Solaikutty.
The company has moved a lot of hardware functions to the LabVIEW software technology platform, which allows clients to adopt any technological changes easily and in real time.