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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (9742)	11/22/1999 8:43:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12475

Indian IT entrepreneur makes it big in Silicon Valley without VC New York, November 22 (IANS) Quite unlike his contemporaries, Bombay native Sanjeev Chitre fought shy of venture capitalists from the beginning on the road to riches in Silicon Valley. Chitre, chairman of the board of Integrated Process Equipment Corporation (IPEC) and founder and chairman of AvantCom Network, Inc, both Silicon Valley-based, started believing as far back as 1989 that the semiconductor equipment industry was destined towards integrated processes. IPEC developed systems for cleaning and photoresist stripping, but soon Chitre saw the potential in chemical-mechanical planerisation (CMP) of semiconductor wafers, a process for making powerful chips. Chitre, 45, got client Sematech to fund his initial production, avoiding venture capital "rightly or wrongly". "If biotech companies could do it, I could," Chitre told India Abroad News Service. And so it turned out as the company grossed close to $89 million in revenues by 1996. Chitre was one to take giant leaps early. He went public with IPEC when it had just eight employees, perhaps the smallest semiconductor company to do so in 1989, and he also bought up a $30 million company, Westech, when IPEC was worth just $1 million in 1993. "When you have nothing to lose, you have everything to win," he said of the acquisition of Westech, which manufactured equipment for CMP. By 1997, Chitre's company's revenues had reached $200 million. By 1998, the going was getting tougher with competition rising in the semiconductor business. A pioneer in CMP, IPEC saw the growth of this once virtually non-existent industry into a billion dollar one with high projected growth rates into year 2000 and beyond. Earlier this year, Chitre started AvantCom and plans to go public with it in June 2000. AvantCom creates Internet technology to perform real time communications and e-commerce in the semi-conductor field. He said he occupies the "business-to-business space" on the Internet, improving the efficiency of businesses worldwide by informing them of the faultlines. "If it costs a company $1 billion to fabricate, if we improve even one per cent of the equipment, we save the company lots of money," Chitre explains. "We are getting paid for information we sell and for transactions people execute in our space." AvantCom has 42 employees and a $2.5 million revenue. "We expect to reach $10 million next year," Chitre said. IPEC, meanwhile, has a revenue of $280 to $300 million. Chitre has already moved on to another hobby which promises to become big business. Seven months ago he hit upon the idea of offering children the opportunity to earn real dollars by creating things on the Internet. Cebein.com emerged and for Chitre it came about because of his daughter Avantika, 11. Cebein stands for "creative brains on the Internet," Chitre explained. "We are using unique technology for children to create their own content. We have created a global dollar. A child in India can buy a Disney shirt through dollars he or she earns by creating on the Net," he said. Chitre is focusing on the pre-teen group of Internet users. Businesses pay Cebein.com for the advantage of having a target audience and Cebein.com is to share part of the revenues with children worldwide. "We are not making money off kids," he insisted, "We are helping them earn more and create." Pilot runs of the website have been conducted. Chitre expects it to come on line by end-January, 2000.