BEIJING, March 21 -- Dell Inc Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said India is losing out to China's mainland, Taiwan and Vietnam in attracting investment in computers because of a refusal to cut import and sales taxes, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday.

    Dell this year will spend roughly 19 billion U.S. dollars with its suppliers in both China's mainland and Taiwan, Dell said yesterday in New Delhi. "The equivalent figure for India is approximately zero" because of high tariffs, Dell, 42, said.

    High import duties and other tariffs curbed personal computer sales in India to six million units last year compared with 25 million in China's mainland, Dell said. The Round Rock, Texas-based company is starting manufacturing at its first Indian factory in July to lessen the impact of taxes and woo new users in the market, where fewer than two out of every 100 people own a PC.

    India's Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram last month didn't propose reductions in import or sales taxes for PCs or computer parts in his budget for the year starting April 1.

    Dell said his company's 86 suppliers have signed a petition seeking to lower India's import duties to zero. Taxes account for as much as 25 percent of the cost of a PC in the South Asian nation, curbing sales and hindering foreign-investment, he said.

    A Taiwanese components-supplier that's unhappy with India's high tariffs told Dell it plans to invest 5 billion dollars in Vietnam over the next 10 years, Dell said.

    "That's 5 billion dollars in capital that could have come to India," he said. "This is a major, major issue."

    Annual sales for Dell in India are forecast to double to 1 billion dollars from about 500 million dollars last year, Dell said. He declined to say when the company will meet its forecast.

    Dell plans to boost the number of employees in India to almost 20,000 in two years, from the 13,000 who now write software or work at the sales, research or customer-service units in the nation, Dayanidhi Maran, federal minister for communications, said on November 17 at the opening of Dell's fourth customer-service center in Gurgaon, near New Delhi.

    "With local manufacturing in place, Dell's most comprehensive presence in the world outside the US will be here in India," Dell said in a statement yesterday. The Indian operations include sales, research and development, manufacturing and customer support, said Dell.

    (Source: Shanghai Daily)