'India needs to build a vertically integrated supply chain'

Revathi Advaithi, CEO, Flex, talks about what India needs to do to become a global manufacturing hub and what the Indian workforce is good at

- Revathi Advaithi

While the world was going into a lockdown in March 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, US-headquartered Flex had to accelerate production. After all, the world’s largest contract manufacturer made products such as smartphones, laptops, data centre infrastructure and healthcare equipment, among others—for which demand suddenly went up. Leading Flex through those challenging times was Revathi Advaithi, who had taken over as CEO in February 2019. The $24-billion Flex has operations across some 30 countries, 100 manufacturing locations, and has 165,000 employees on its rolls. Advaithi, 54—who is based in San Jose and is a mechanical engineer from BITS, Pilani, with an MBA from Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management—joined Flex after stints at power management firm Eaton and technology major Honeywell. In an interaction with Business Today’s Nidhi Singal, the Flex CEO talks about India’s manufacturing story, the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, and skilling, among other things. Edited excerpts:

Q: Flex has six manufacturing facilities in India. Where does the country stand in the company’s scheme of things?

A: We have our presence in and around Chennai for manufacturing. We also have big infrastructure [facilities]—I don’t like to call it back office because it’s really not back-office support for our teams based in India. We have 18,000 employees in India in manufacturing and in the kind of support side of [the business that we] need for [our] global requirements.