Lokesh Woos Global Firms with AP Manufacturing Proposals

Andhra Pradesh's IT and electronics minister Nara Lokesh is on a mission to bring global companies to the state. He recently met with top executives from major firms like Vivo, Cisco, Abbott, Mastercard, and SAP in New Delhi to pitch AP as an ideal location for manufacturing units, engineering centers, and data-center supply chains.

Lokesh specifically asked Vivo India president Arjit Sen to explore setting up a mobile components manufacturing facility in Tirupati. Sen said the proposals would be discussed with the company's senior management.

The minister also made a broader pitch for a data-center ecosystem to Cisco India MD Harish Krishnan, saying the government wants the entire value chain to come to AP and sought manufacturing facilities for UCS servers, switches, and routers. He invited Cisco to establish an engineering center or GCC in Visakhapatnam.