Maran puts Chennai on top of IT investors

Out of the total FDI commitment, more than 10 per cent has gone to Chennai, reports Prerna K Mishra.

Communications and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran has worked magic for Chennai. His own ministry's data notes that out of the total foreign direct investment (FDI) commitment of over $16.6 billion in Indian IT and telecom in the last 20 months, nearly $1.7 billion - or more than 10 per cent - has gone to this single city. Maran is MP from Central Chennai, one of the city's three Lok Sabha constituencies.

Typically, for every dollar put in by a foreign investor, the company usually raises one dollar in debt, Chennai has an investment commitment of about $ 3.4 billion neatly folded up it sleeve.

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Of the remaining $15 billion, almost $14 billion are big ticket announcements made by hardware, software and networking majors. These include the about $1 billion commitment each made by Cisco Systems, Intel and SAP. The other major chunk of this investment is through the SemIndia-AMD combine that has committed to pump in $3 billion into the manufacturing hub for semiconductors. IBM and Microsoft are committed to pump in $6 billion and $1.7 billion into the Indian operations respectively.

EMC has committed $500 million.

While the larger FDI commitments mentioned above will be disbursed across the country depending upon the expansion blueprint of the investors, Chennai clearly emerges as the winner as far as smaller individual FDI commitments are concerned. All the other states put together get a little above $1 billion dollars of the FDI bounty.

Flextronics, Siemens, Ericsson, Texas Instruments and Motorola have committed an investment of $100 million each.