India is fast catching up with China in the Asia-Pacific market in terms of

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performance, while recording among the highest growth figures globally last year, founder chairman and chief executive, SanDisk, Dr Eli Harari, said at a media conference here on Thursday.

He said that the market here was just about growing and the advent of 3G later this year would offer a big fillip to company’s fortunes in India. “India’s sales trajectory is growing. We have had record growth rates across verticals-desktops, USB, and mobiles flash cards here,” Harari added. SanDisk, global CEO, visited India to inspect for the first time the company’s R&D facility in Bangalore.

Describing India as the “global talent pool and an ideas nation”, Harari said SanDisk would seek to tap the IT management prowess of the local talent here and leverage it across the globe. He announced the headcount at Bangalore would be doubled to 100 this year with an opportunity, primarily to build the IT faculty.

Talking of the difficult times the company faced early last year to turn “hugely profitable in the fourth quarter”, he said the learning was that it was markets like China and India that offered a new platform to SanDisk.

He though admitted that the growth story here would happen only when the 3 G platform would happen in a big way. “As and when it happens, it is a great incentive to all kinds of flash memory devices,” he said and added that mobile Internet was going to be the big business driver.