An electrical engineering graduate from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysuru, Ramesh Kunhikannan cofounded Kaynes in 1988 with a conviction that India could, on its own, build world-class electronics manufacturing capability. Today, Kaynes operates sixteen facilities in four countries.
After the company’s landmark initial public offering in November 2022, Kunhikannan founded Kaynes Semicon, which has now completed India’s first integrated semiconductor backend facility at Sanand, Gujarat.
In an interview with THE WEEK, Kunhikannan shares his plans, the lessons from his journey and India’s semiconductor future. Excerpts:
Q/ Kaynes took a leap of faith by entering virgin territory with semiconductor manufacturing in Gujarat, and actually pulled it off. Did you ever have any fear of the unknown in the initial stages?
Of course, whenever you step into something as complex as semiconductors, there’s always a sense of the unknown. But honestly, we didn’t look at it as a risk — we looked at it as a responsibility.
What gave us the confidence to proceed was not bravado — it was structured preparation. We spent considerable time understanding the OSAT ecosystem globally, studying what Taiwan, Malaysia, and South Korea had built over decades.
India needed this capability, and we believed we had the foundation to build it. So instead of fear, there was clarity — that with the right intent, people, and execution, we could make it happen.
Q/ Getting Alpha & Omega onboard as a partner was crucial. How did it come about?
Partnerships like this don’t happen overnight. It takes time, trust, and many conversations. What worked in our favor was that we didn’t just talk about vision — we showed commitment. AOS saw that we were serious about building long-term capability, not just setting up a facility.
Q/ What are your plans for expansion?
Right now, the focus is on stabilising operations, scaling up and building strong customer relationships. Over time, we want to move deeper into advanced packaging and specialised capabilities.
Q/ Do you think this venture is a model that can be replicated elsewhere in India?
Not only can it be replicated, it has to be. One assembly and testing facility in Gujarat does not make India a semiconductor nation. It makes India a proof of concept. The difference between a proof of concept and an ecosystem is multiplication—more facilities, more technology focus areas, more geographies, more players who look at what Kaynes has done and say, ‘We can do this, too—in our segment, in our state’.
Q/ Kaynes is focusing on skilled manpower—recruiting young people and getting them trained by experienced professionals from abroad. How effective is the approach?
More effective than I expected. The model works because the two groups need each other in a very specific way. The experienced professionals—many of them Indian engineers who built careers at TSMC, Intel and Amkor—carry the intuition of the fab floor. They know what a yield problem looks like before the numbers confirm it. They know which process variable to touch first when something goes wrong. That instinct is built over years of doing, not studying.
The young Indian engineers bring something equally irreplaceable. And they have something the experienced professionals sometimes have to rediscover: the ability to look at a problem without preconception. Some of our best process innovations have come from young engineers asking, ‘Why do we do it this way’, and getting the answer: ‘Actually, we don’t have to.’
The transfer of knowledge between these two cohorts is the heart of the model.
Q/ If there has to be a drastic overhaul of our curricula that factors in these new tech advancements, what do we need to do on the skilling front?
The easy answer is: update the curriculum, add semiconductor courses, build more labs. All of that is necessary and should happen. But it is not sufficient.
The deeper problem is structural. India’s engineering education system was built, over decades, to produce software engineers. That was a rational response to where the jobs were. And it produced extraordinary results—India’s software talent is genuinely world-class. But the hardware renaissance that is now underway requires a different kind of engineer, and we cannot produce that engineer by adding a few elective modules to a curriculum that was designed for a different destination.
What needs to change is the relationship between industry and academia at the foundational level. Deep, structural partnership where faculty spend time in working facilities, where curriculum is co-designed with industry practitioners, where students spend meaningful semesters doing real work in real environments.
Q/ Have you considered going to global biggies for a partnership for future ventures - say an Nvidia or a TSMC? Would you look at expanding into the design aspect or say, all other aspects of the semicon universe?
We are open to partnerships that bring real value. It’s not about big names — it’s about building capability, execution strength, and market reach in a meaningful way.
On the question of design — India is already a design powerhouse, and that is not an area where Kaynes needs to build from scratch. What was missing was the manufacturing side — the ability to take a designed chip and actually build and test it in India. That is the gap we are filling.
Could we eventually extend further into the value chain? I would not rule it out. But our philosophy has always been to go deep before we go wide.
Q/ Has Kaynes considered getting into consumer electronics manufacturing EMS, like TV, home appliances, or even smartphones?
Kaynes today is a high-reliability, high-complexity electronics manufacturer. Defence, aerospace, industrial, medical, railways. The reason we are in those segments is not accidental — it is a deliberate choice built on 30 years of developing the kind of quality culture and technical depth that those markets demand. That is our identity and our competitive advantage.
Consumer electronics is a different world. The volumes are enormous, the margins are thin, the product cycles are brutal, and the supply chain discipline required is of a completely different nature. To enter that world tomorrow, without preparation, without the right cost structure, without the right customer relationships — that would be a mistake.
But do I think Kaynes will never be in that space? I would not say that either.
Here is how I think about it. India is on the cusp of becoming one of the world's largest consumer electronics markets. Smartphone manufacturing is already happening here at scale — and deepening. The 'China plus one' conversation is very real for global consumer electronics brands looking to diversify their supply chains. And as our semiconductor capability at Sanand matures, something interesting starts to happen — the chip that goes into the television or the appliance or the smartphone could, one day, be packaged and tested in India too. That creates a very different kind of integration opportunity than pure contract manufacturing.
So the honest answer is: consumer electronics EMS, in the way it exists today, is not where we are headed right now. But a future in which Kaynes participates in the consumer electronics value chain — at the right moment, in the right form, with the right strategic logic — is not something I would rule out. The semiconductor capability we are building changes the calculus over time.