Brands
Samsung Mobile leads in TRA’S Most Attractive Brands’ list
MUMBAI: India’s Most Attractive Brands Report 2018 (MAB 2018), in its fifth edition, has listed the country’s most attractive 1000 brands, based on TRA’s proprietary model of brand attractiveness. The study is an annual syndicated primary research conducted with 2500 consumer-influencers across 16 Indian cities. Leading the pack, India’s most attractive brand is Samsung, the Korean mobile phone manufacturer, which also inaugurated the world’s largest mobile phone factory in Noida earlier this year.
Tata Motors, which has shown very good market performance recently, is ranked 2nd all-India, with a phenomenal jump from 181 rank last year. Apple iPhone, ranked 3rd this year, having jumped up from the 92nd rank in 2017. Reliance Jio, the three-year-old disrupter telecom brand and already the third largest mobile phone network in India, ranks 3rd among India’s most attractive brands and tops the mobile telephony category unseating last year’s leader, Airtel. Maruti Suzuki is ranked the 5th most attractive brand in India, up two ranks over last year. The next five ranks among the top ten are Samsung (consumer electronics) at 6th, Dell (laptops) at 7th, SBI (Bank – PSU) at 8th, Nike (sportswear) at 9th and Honda (four-wheeler) at 10th.
“Attractiveness or desire can be defined as the response to a sense of longing for anything – a product, brand, person or an outcome. When brands score high on TRA’s brand attractiveness research, they have successfully created similar subconscious pull. Such brands have intense magnetic power over the consumers. It is extremely gratifying to see that Indian brands have the maximum presence among the top 100,” said TRA Research CEO N Chandramouli, on the launch of the report. He expanded that 49 Indian, 18 American, six South Korean, six Japanese & two Chinese brands made it to the top 100.
Chandramouli further added, “Categories of gadgetry, mobile services, automobiles, and consumer electronics have the largest average attractiveness index this year. All these categories are highly driven by individual personalities and this shows a rise in the self-awareness – a growing sense of purpose and social-worth of the Indian consumer.”
The report lists 286 categories under 34 super-categories. The other category leaders in this report are Levi’s (casualwear), Biba (ethnicwear-women), Siyaram (fabrics), Allen Solly (formalwear), MRF (tyres), ICICI Bank (bank-private), SBI (bank-PSU), HSBC (bank-Foreign), Visa (credit /debit card), Fastrack (branded fashion), Gucci (luxury fashion), Kenstar (consumer appliances), Samsung (consumer electronics), Symphony (air coolers), LG ((refrigerator), Samsung (washing machines), Philips (lighting), Odonil (air fresheners), Himalaya (baby products), Nippo (batteries), Coca-Cola (aerated beverages), Kit Kat (chocolate bar), Canon (cameras), Patanjali (ayurvedic products), Moov (pain balm), Prestige (cookware), Roca (bath fixtures/sanitaryware), Taj Hotels (hotels –premium), Google (internet search), Amazon (online retail), Ola (taxi aggregation), ACC (cement), Hero (cycles), Nike (sportswear), Titan (watches), DLF (real estate), FBB (fashion retail), Nataraj (writing accessories), Dell (laptops), Hewlett Packard (personal technology) and Jet Airways (airline – private).
Brands
Tessolve lands a semiconductor veteran to drive its next big push
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, who started his career at ISRO and has spent 35 years building chips and companies, joins the Bengaluru-based firm as president and chief operating officer
BENGALURU: Tessolve has never been shy about its ambitions. The Bengaluru-based engineering services firm already counts 18 of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies among its clients, employs more than 3,500 engineers across 12 countries, and last year pocketed a $150m investment from TPG. Now it has hired the executive it believes can turn those assets into something bigger. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, a 35-year semiconductor veteran who once built satellite payloads for ISRO and has since scaled engineering organisations across three continents, joins as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
THE MAN AND THE MANDATE
The appointment is, by any measure, a serious hire. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu comes to Tessolve after senior leadership stints at HCL Technologies, Altran and Wipro, where he managed large profit-and-loss portfolios and oversaw cross-regional teams. Over the course of his career, he has been instrumental in bringing more than 1,000 new products to market across the high-tech, energy and manufacturing verticals. Before the private sector claimed him, he began his working life as a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation, contributing to research and development in charge-coupled device technology and satellite payloads, a foundation that shaped everything that followed.
In his new role, he will lead Tessolve’s global growth strategy: expanding its engineering capabilities, deepening customer relationships and accelerating innovation across semiconductor and high-performance computing domains. The brief is broad, but the context is specific. Tessolve operates in the $550 billion global semiconductor market, and its recent moves, the acquisition of Germany’s Dream Chip Technologies and the TPG funding round, have sharpened both its reach and its expectations.
Srini Chinamilli, co-founder and chief executive of Tessolve, is characteristically direct about why Ravi Kumar Chirugudu was the choice:
“As we scale our global semiconductor and system engineering capabilities, Ravi’s appointment marks an important step forward. As global semiconductor demand continues to accelerate across industries, it is creating significant opportunities across the semiconductor lifecycle, from design, packaging, validation and systems integration. Ravi’s deep knowledge and leadership in this ecosystem brings the right mix of industry expertise, customer connect and execution capability, which will play a key role in strengthening our position as a trusted global engineering partner and reinforcing our market leadership.”
THE NEW ARRIVAL SPEAKS
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, for his part, frames the move in terms of timing and culture, two factors that veteran executives tend to weigh as heavily as title or compensation:
“I am happy to join Tessolve at a time when the industry is rapidly evolving towards more complex, AI-driven systems. What stands out to me is its strong people-first culture and its commitment to bringing value to its customers. The strength of its global team, combined with its deep expertise in semiconductor innovation and next-generation product engineering, creates a solid foundation to build differentiated, scalable solutions. I look forward to working closely with the team to drive strategic growth and strengthen its role in shaping the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
The reference to AI-driven systems is not incidental. The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a structural reshaping, driven by the insatiable compute demands of artificial intelligence. For engineering services firms like Tessolve, which offers end-to-end capabilities from silicon design to packaged parts and invests in high-performance computing, high-speed interfaces, photonics and 5G, the moment is both an opportunity and a test. The company says it is well positioned to capture the next wave of industry growth. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu is now the person who has to prove it.
He came in from outer space, literally, and spent three decades learning how the semiconductor industry works from the inside out. Now Tessolve is betting that accumulated knowledge can help it cross the next frontier. In the $550 billion global chip market, the gap between ambition and execution is measured in engineering hours and leadership quality. Tessolve has just gone shopping for both.
