From 15 October I will be at the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, in the first phase — electronics, machinery, hardware, lighting, industrial components. The 140th session.
I want to write down why before I go, because the reason is not the obvious one and I would rather be honest about it now than come back with a tidy story.
The thing I keep running into
I wrote recently that some of India's best technology is already here, sitting finished in university laboratories, and that nothing in the system is built to carry it across to a product. I stand by that. But I left out the part that is hardest to say, which is that I did not fully understand what the distance was made of until we started building instruments ourselves.
It is not the science. The science is usually done.
The distance is made of questions that sound trivial written down and are not. What does this enclosure cost at a thousand units, and at ten thousand. Who already makes a connector close enough to this that we do not have to tool a new one. What is the lead time on that sensor housing if we order in February. Is this membrane a stock part somewhere in the world, or are we about to spend eight months and a great deal of money discovering it is not.
Nobody in a lab knows those answers. They are not lab questions. And you cannot look most of them up, because the real answer is not on a website — it is a person telling you what they actually have in stock and what they can actually hold to tolerance.
What a trade fair is actually for
So the honest reason I am going is not procurement. I am not going with a shopping list.
I am going because a floor like that is the fastest way I know to find out what is already manufacturable. Twenty thousand companies in one place, each of them making something they will show you and quote you on. A week of that recalibrates your sense of what is cheap, what is hard, what is a solved problem and what genuinely is not.
That recalibration is worth more to us than any single purchase order. Half of what makes a hardware product impossible is believing you have to build something that someone has been making for twenty years. The other half is assuming something is off-the-shelf when it is not, and finding out after you have designed around it.
For VidyuthLabs, where we are trying to make lab-grade electrochemistry portable, that distinction is the entire programme. A handheld analyser lives or dies on whether its parts are boring.
The part I want to be careful about
There is a version of this post that would be much more impressive and much less true — the one where I list the partnerships I am going to sign and the categories I am going to enter.
I do not know yet. I am going to look, ask, and listen, and most of what I learn will be negative: this is harder than I thought, that is cheaper than I assumed, this supplier is not serious. Negative findings are the useful ones. They are just not the ones that make good announcements.
What I can say is the standard I am applying. We only enter a sector where the work is real and the organisation is poor, and we only commit after something has survived live operation. A trade fair does not change that. It just tells you which doors are even open.
And the reason underneath the reason
I keep coming back to a number: fifty thousand people employed within ten years.
You do not get there with software. I have said that before and it remains the most clarifying sentence I know about my own work. Software scales beautifully and employs very few people. Things that are made — instruments, equipment, components, the unglamorous physical economy — employ people at every step, from the floor to the field service engineer.
Which means that if the number is real, I have to get good at manufacturing. Not admire it from a distance. Get good at it.
India is going to make far more of its own hardware over the next decade. That is already happening and it does not need me to cheer for it. But the companies that do it well will be the ones who learned early, in detail, and from people who have been doing it longer. Learning from one of the deepest manufacturing ecosystems in the world, from people who have spent decades getting this right, is simply the sensible move.
We do not have competitors in the way people assume. We have suppliers, collaborators, people a decade ahead of us on a specific problem, and a very long list of things we do not yet know.
Next week I go and find out a few of them.
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Writing this from Hyderabad, two days before leaving. If you are also going to be in Guangzhou for the first phase, I would genuinely like to meet — [email protected].