Fab City anchor companies get notices

HYDERABAD, INDIA: The Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation and the state Major Industries Ministry have lost patience. In a stern action taken on Saturday, the state government decided to serve notices on SemIndia and NanoTech, the two anchor companies for the much-awaited Fab City project.

The two companies have been asked to explain the reasons for the delay in setting up the Fab City, which is coming up in Shamshabad in the outskirts of Hyderabad.

Originally intended to be a semiconductor fabricator hub, the Fab City project has now turned into solar fabs unit.

Companies were granted large portions of the hub to start chip manufacturing.

Phase one of the project was to be completed by April 2008. In April, Nano Tech Silicon, promoted by South Korean June Min announced a partnership with Hyderabad-based Goldstone Infratech to start a solar fabricator - TF solar power.

Min also said that a semiconductor fabricator would require a lot of investment at one go, which it has not been able to gather.

Min, who has supposedly help set up fabricators in Korea, China and US, spoke of the requirement of investments by the country's largest business houses if semiconductor fabricators need to see the light of the day in India.

STPI, Hyderabad while announcing its exports for the year 2007-08 also presented an update of the Fab City project.

Ironically AP Invest CEO and IT advisor to the state government, CS Rao, declared the project 'a success' with all land allotted to solar fabricators.

Sources from SemIndia say that the management is still trying to sort this issue, while talks of the project started off with much fanfare.

To attract funding for the proposed 3 billion dollars project seems very difficult for a start up company such as SemIndia.