Transformer by Mint | Out of jobs: Is AI killing mass recruitment at India’s engineering colleges?

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate, widely referred to as the ‘godfather of AI’, even advised people earlier this year to “train to be a plumber". Turns out, the threat of AI slashing jobs is not far away.

Last week, my colleague Jas Bardia crunched some numbers to find that this year, India’s 1.3 million-strong engineering graduates have fewer mass recruiters to fall back upon. This is a problem: India’s top IT services firms, such as TCS, Infosys and HCLTech, are India’s biggest tech employers. Yet, in the first six months of this fiscal, the top 10 IT firms hired just 40% of net new additions that they did in the same period last year.

For a sector that still employs over 1.5 million people just across the top five firms, a sustained decline in employment over three years is a telling statistic.

GCCs pull back too

The stress doesn’t end there. Jas also tracked India’s top captive engineering units of global companies—its famed GCC ecosystem. Here too, the hiring slowdown is unmistakable. This double squeeze affects both engineers and staffing firms, which rely heavily on GCC mandates. With nearly 10% of staffing firms’ annual income dependent on these captives, the contraction is alarming.

Should you really start diverting your skills away from tech? No, the answer is far more nuanced than that. To find out more, read our comprehensive coverage of the ongoing landslide in India’s tech jobs playing out now.

Nvidia, memory chips, and budget phones walk into a bar

This one’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse story. Turns out, the demand for all the AI around you is leading to more data centres demanding more Nvidia GPUs—currently pretty much the equivalent of oxygen for global tech.

But, Nvidia in turn demands more memory chips from the likes of Samsung and SK Hynix, who make them. These folks, in turn, demand more production lines for making the specialized memory chips that the top GPUs need.

To keep up, they’ve begun prioritising AI-grade memory and diverting capacity away from the conventional DDR chips used in everyday phones and laptops.

But, even though the demand cycle for phones and laptops haven’t quite ramped up since covid-19, they still sell in massive numbers worldwide. A prolonged supply squeeze through 2025 has already pushed memory chip prices up by 50%, with another 50% rise expected over six years.

THIS, in turn, means that budget phones in India, which sell at wafer-thin margins in hopes to play the volume game, are being forced to increase prices. Xiaomi and Realme tell us that new product prices next year are likely to be revised, while Apple—well, the iPhone economics continue to be rather different.

At the end of this rather interesting domino effect of price hikes and supply crunch, we’re now at a point where on top of no organic demand for phones and laptops, there’s a price rise for brands to contend with. Are you still looking to buy a new one?

The miraculous survival of Vodafone-Idea

My veteran colleague T Surendar joined hands with our resident telecom expert Jatin Grover last week to script the tale of Vodafone Idea, and how, with debts worth over ₹2.3 trillion at one point, the telco somehow managed to survive.

This 2000-word narrative, which tells the tale of how the Centre got involved, the convoluted and complicated Supreme Court verdicts, and how Vi almost became a PSU, is an absolute belter of a read—offering an up-close view into the innards of India’s telecom industry.

From a journey of 13 telcos a decade ago to the survival of just three private and one state-backed operator, this sector has seen it all. And, as satcom comes to the fore and 5G continues to ramp up, there’s more wild goose chase to follow. For Vi, though, there’s the play for survival on the anvil—and Suri and Jatin have scripted this very tale, of what’s at stake if Vi fails.

This is one for the ages, and a metric to revisit for when Vi finally goes bust—or succeeds.

In conversation with Apple’s chief iPhone designer

Last week, we also spoke with Richard Dinh, head of iPhone product design at Apple. This was a fascinating chat for multiple reasons, but more importantly, the fact that Apple still remains a company that obsesses over a tiny difference in the specific mix of alloys in a metal used to make its iPhone.

And it’s hard to fault that obsession. The iPhone brings in over $200 billion globally for Apple and remains the cornerstone of its brand halo. In India, too, even as overall smartphone sales have declined for four straight years, iPhone sales continue to surge.

Dinh, along with his colleague Will True, had fascinating insights to offer—including how Apple approaches product design, and what it expects from its R&D spends. If you’ve been an iPhone fan, this one’s a must-read for you.

In other news: Trouble at Tejas, leapfrog by L&T

There’s trouble brewing for the Tata-backed Tejas Networks, whose indigenous telecom infrastructure appears to be under fire. Last week, Jatin reported that state-run BSNL, whose 4G network is entirely powered by Tejas’ infrastructure, is facing issues in transmission strength across thousands of its towers. This is causing call drops and slow data speeds for many, many users. This, as it stands, could be the start of prolonged trouble for Tejas—and the future of India’s localized telecom equipment.

Finally, we met with Arun Ramchandani, a veteran of the engineering and defence industries, and currently at the helm of defence affairs at India’s top construction conglomerate, Larsen & Toubro. Turns out, L&T is scaling $1 billion in defence revenue this year, as it expects contracts such as a light tank for the Army, and an air defence system for the Air Force. As private sector interest in defence contracts grows, giants like Tata, Adani and Mahindra are catching up—but L&T remains firmly in the lead.

Transformer by Mint is a weekly newsletter that brings India’s most important and interesting technology updates under one umbrella. As the world transforms with every day of innovation, Transformer will keep a tab on the impact that technologies will make in each of our lives. Published every week, the newsletter brings some of India’s tech landscape’s most insightful coverages until date.