Airtel Begins Manufacturing STBs back in India with Skyworth in Noida

Airtel has stopped importing HD Set Top Boxes completely, moving production to Noida with Skyworth Electronics.

Airtel Moves STB Production back in India to Noida

Previously, it had ties with MyBox Tech to manufacture its non-smart STBs in Pune (Ranjangaon). However, it had stopped production in India and imported from south Asian countries to leverage FTA duty benefits.

The DTH company has plans for a full transition to local STBs; these include Airtel's high-end Xstream 4K Android TV Box, by the year's end. As such, the company has already started providing locally manufactured devices to customers.

This move comes as the telco's strategy to source all telecom, network equipment and STBs from within India. In that regard, the telco has asked its networking partners Nokia and Ericsson to provide only indigenous 4G and 5G equipment. Also, the telco has held talks with TCS to create local 5G solutions. Next year, the companies will start trials of their homegrown 5G stack.

Sunil Taldar, CEO - DTH, Bharti Airtel, said, "India’s electronics manufacturing ecosystem has built capabilities locally and companies can now have better quality control over products, resulting in Airtel moving production back to India. We are very pleased with the level of product quality our partners have delivered". He added, "this is a major milestone in Airtel Digital TV’s growth journey and a sign of India’s fast-growing manufacturing capabilities".

Recently, Bharti Enterprises and Dixon Technologies signed a pact to form a JV to manufacture telecom and networking products. The latter also had filed for the Telecom PLI Scheme worth Rs. 12,195 crore with the Ministry of Communications.