Timex  is considering making India a global sourcing base to reduce manufacturing costs, a senior executive said. Currently, Timex has its global manufacturing hubs in Hong Kong, China and Japan. “A high-level team is working on a project to identify what all can be imported from India and what will be the cost benefit,” said V.D. Wadhwa, managing director, Timex Group India told the Daily Mint.

For Middlebury, CT based Timex, which operates across 100 countries, India is the only geography where it has a design center and a manufacturing base catering to the local market. Wadhwa said it is important to manufacture in India and meet part of the global requirement with the appreciation of dollar and higher wage costs. Manufacturing in China is no longer cost-effective.

What this means

For supply chain executives,  who wish to diversify beyond China, India is becoming increasingly interesting.

To obtain patent protection internationally it is necessary to file a patent application and and to prosecute the application to grant of a patent.

Many medical device companies are wary of the process, but with the help of an experienced patent agent/attorney, the process can be completed relatively smoothly. Here are a few of the key issues companies should consider when obtaining patent protection in the BRIC countries, according to attorney D’vorah Graeser, Graeser Associates International in Chicago as quoted in EMDT.

Budgeting for international patent costs can be challenging, given the differences between the patent systems. But India is an exception among the BRIC countries. Patent applications are filed and prosecuted in English. Furthermore, filing and prosecution costs in India are quite reasonable, lower than costs in Europe or the USA and lower than Brazil, Russia or China.

Apart from the requirement to pay regular (typically yearly) fees, some of the BRIC countries also have post-grant requirements that must be fulfilled to avoid cancellation of the granted patent. India, for example, requires filing of a yearly post-grant statement of working, describing the commercial exploitation in India of the invention disclosed in the patent. If commercial exploitation does not occur within three years of receiving the granted patent, a third party could request a compulsory licence of the patent. Selling the medical device in India, directly or through a licensee, may be sufficient to fulfill this requirement.

The New York Times conducted an interesting series of interviews in Shanghai and New Delhi asking Chines and Indians what they think of their own countries and each other’s countries.

As one Indian says in the video, “We have gone from Bhai Bhai (a period of friendship and brotherhood in the 1950′s) to Bye-Bye (from the 1960′s due to the Chinese invasion of 1962 and the long tail of hostility ) to Buy-Buy (or expanding trade).”

Click here to watch the video.

In 2010 American exports to Asia exceeded shipments to the Europe for the first time ever. Yesterday, I met U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke who was in Los Angeles to promote President Obama’s  National Export Initiative (NEI), which seeks to double American exports to $2 trillion by 2014.

Speaking at the Asia Pacific Business Outlook conference, Locke said exports now supported 10 million jobs in America, including 700,000 in California. One in three manufacturing jobs and one in five agricultural jobs in the United States were tied directly to exports. In addition, exports were a key driver of economic recovery in the past two years, accounting for nearly half U.S. economic growth since 2009, according to Locke.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and me

In my work at Amritt, my colleagues and I are vigorous supporters of the NEI. In fact the topic of my talk at the same conference was how to increase exports to India five-fold not just two-fold; we believe that this is quite doable.

Secretary Locke, the first Chinese American to hold a cabinet post, is expected to become the next U.S. Ambassador to China  by June of this year.

Takeaway: Asia and India in particular is hugely important to America’s economic engine going forward.

No matter whether you look at economics, culture, business, language or politics, there are  aspects of India that are uniquely bizarre or out of the world.  But sometimes, even The India Expert has to raise its eyebrows, as we did when we came across this entry about “enclaves”  in  The Economist

“These are like islands of Indian and Bangladeshi territory surrounded completely by the other country’s land, clustered on either side of Bangladesh’s border with the district of Cooch Behar, in the Indian state of West Bengal. Surreally, these include about two dozen counter-enclaves (enclaves within enclaves), as well as the world’s only counter-counter enclave—a patch of Bangladesh that is surrounded by Indian territory…itself surrounded by Bangladeshi territory.”

You can read the entire article  here.

The  business takeaway in the story is the hopeful news that India may finally resolve the border dispute with Bangladesh.  That will make it easier to deal with the two more intractable problems with China and Pakistan.  China claims all of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.  In Ladakh  (Jammu & Kashmir) a huge swath of Indian territory is occupied by China.  Pakistan and India both claim all of Kashmir, which is currently split between the two. If these conflicts go away, India will suffer less distractions and its economy will grow faster. People who live in these border states will benefit greatly.  So the Bangladesh situation may be a small but important step in the right direction.