“Our Commitment To India Is Huge And Multi-Dimensional”

Dr Leo Li, chairman, spreadtrum communications, was on a whirlwind visit to india recently meeting policy makers, senior government officials, business associates and his india team. Despite the tight schedule, he took out time to interact with my mobile magazine and dwelt upon many subjects. 

- Shelley Vishwajeet

What were the key ingredients of your strategy and vision for the almost impossible turnaround of Spreadtrum? 

Well, there were many components of the strategy to infuse life into a downhill company. On the one hand, we needed to find out where we were going wrong – an honest appraisal of ourselves; on the other hand, we needed to find out what customers wanted. So, the transformation had to come both internally and externally. The company had lost focus on customers and was not investing in innovation.

So I started talking to customers. I talked to our own people. Some problems were easy to resolve, some were not so easy. I was able to motivate my team. I started rewarding good people, elevated deserving ones to right positions and fired some bad bunch. We changed the quality process, changed the production and testing processes. We introduced many things which should have been there but were not there before. as our customers had lost confidence in us, I offered them 100% replacement warrantee on our chipset. no question asked. Our customers saw that I was serious and we started winning them back. and there has been no looking back.

But it wasn’t easy. We are a Chinese company and the handset makers were all Chinese and they knew what the problems with Spreadtrum were. They had burnt their hands once, twice and they did not want to give us a third chance. Even small customers were not ready to see me. Once a person came and wanted to see me. I was very happy that finally we have a customer. But it turned out that he was a Chinese guy who had not seen an american Chinese with a Ph.D and wanted to see the wonder that I was!! Laughs!