Intel's Sean Maloney scoffs at India's obsession with the mobile phone
Name: Sean Maloney
Age: 52
Designation: Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Intel
Ethnicity: British citizen of Irish descent and grew up in London
Work History: Started at Intel UK. Served as technical assistant to legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove. Handled Intel’s sales for Asia Pacific. In the current assignment since 2006
Hobbies: Has swum across the Thames. Cracked ribs often while skiing. Avowed gym rat
Future: Tipped to be the next CEO of Intel
On WiMAX adoption, we saw a few setbacks. Nokia stopped production of WiMAX-enabled handsets. Nortel went bankrupt. Intel’s investments in Clearwire hasn’t borne much fruit. How much does that bother you?
Not everybody is going to make money making equipment. There are a few people doubling down, cooling away. But there are others who have done well. There is a healthy WiMAX ecosystem in place now. You go to Moscow or Tokyo; there are computing devices available from dozens of manufacturers. So, I think the folks who are the most hostile to the idea of WiMAX are the ones who want to stay with older technologies because they make money there. They have been very vocal when people pull out. Meanwhile, WiMAX continues to move ahead.
You spoke of hostility to the technology. In India, telecom operators, especially the GSM players, seem to have their reservations about the technology. Then there is the whole thing about a lack of clarity on policy, high licence fees, all of which are unanticipated hurdles.
Cellular operators in India are busy selling cellphones. The market here is not saturated. So, it doesn’t surprise me cellular operators are preoccupied with this. If you go back to the early days of cellular, many of the companies that were successful in cellular were new entrants. And, many of the traditional telecom players at that point were selling fixed lines. They were not successful in making the transition. So, there are new entrants all the time who are willing to make the transition and that is always healthy. If there are service providers who want to do broadband access, wireless Internet as well as cellular services, great. If they don’t and are busy with other things, we understand. But they are not mutually exclusive options.
Is this the kind of thing that you face in other geographies as well?
The landscape is unique place by place. If you look at the oldest 3G markets which were Korea and Japan, they were the first markets to deploy WiMAX. It was no accident. They got over their religious issues and realised they needed a very low cost way to transmit data. Ultimately if you stand back, service providers need to be able to handle mind boggling amounts of data at a low cost. That is going to be the future. And you need the lowest cost way to deal with that. Ultimately, nobody is going to disagree with that. But each country has its own regulatory environment and its own set of local issues. I think the most striking thing about India is that the economic growth rate is high. And it has been high for a long period of time. The economic profile is high. But Internet penetration is low. That is quite conspicuous and there is a great opportunity here for anybody who wants to take advantage.
There is a school of thought that has argued India can perhaps skip the PC to access the Internet and go the cell-phone route. Do you think there is some merit in that argument?
If India were to decide let’s just use the cellphone, the population would be at such a gross disadvantage. It would be such a tragedy. Small and medium businesses without computing will be at a huge disadvantage versus large enterprises. If kids here do not have access to the Internet except through the cellphone unlike kids in other parts of the world, what do you think it will do to the economy in 15 years? So, I would be very wary of taking advice about accessing the Internet through the cellphone. If your child views the Internet through the phone and somebody else gets a full experience, think of the difference. The Web was not designed for the cellphone.
If India were to maintain a massive difference in access to IT versus its competition economically, that would be a big infrastructural set back.
How do technology companies like Intel take a call on what technology to bet on?
The first thing we ask ourselves is, whatever technology you are betting on, can
you manufacture it in hundreds of millions of units? You can make one of anything. Can you make a billion of it and make it reliable? So, when we make a chip, it has to last for years in the most extreme climates. So, is it mass manufacturable and could it be completely global? Technology is global. So, you need to think in global scales.
Are you solving an obvious problem? Are you doing something that tackles a big problem?
We’ve got a digital divide that will get increasingly emotional in the next few years and that will need to be closed. You’ve got energy, healthcare, transportation, construction; all have major issues to deal with. So, we look at our technology developments and ask how we are going to move the needle on these problems. That keeps us busy.
(This story appears in the 11 September, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)