Applied Materials India appoints new President

Semiconductor firm Applied Materials has appointed Avi Avula as the President of India office. In addition, Avula is also assuming vice president of the semiconductor products group (SPG) Asia. 

This Avula’s second stint at the company. He earlier worked there between 2006 and 2014 at different positions including director of corporate business development and managing director of advanced packing and growth. Besides Applied Materials, Avula has worked at organisations such DuPont and Methode Electronics; he is an industry veteran with an experience of close to three decades. An alumnus of Osmania University, Texas A&M University, and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Avula’s last held role was that of SemiAdvisory’s director.

The post was lying vacant since January 2024 at the time when the previous Applied Materials India president Srinivas Satya exited the firm to join Tata Electronics.  Satheesh Kuppurao, the Vice President of Business Development and Growth acted as the interim Country President during that period.

Satya joined Applied Materials since 1995 and worked across various technical, business, and strategy customer-facing roles in different business units in the semiconductor and energy segments, as well as in Finance, Corporate, and Business Development.  In 2015, he became the President and MD of Applied Materials India. 

To be sure, the US semiconductor company Applied Materials in June 2023 announced its plans to invest $400 million over the next four years in a state-of-the-art engineering centre in India. In its first five years of operation, the centre is expected to support more than $2 billion of planned investments and create at least 500 new advanced engineering jobs along with potentially another 2,500 jobs in the manufacturing ecosystem, the company said in a statement. 

Further, in March this year, the company commissioned a new validation. Named the ‘India Validation Center’ (IVC) at Bengaluru, this centre is being built at an investment of $20 million. This is in addition to the $400 million investment announced by the company.