Indian electronics manufacturing company VVDN is in advanced stages of designing mobile phones with 5G support for an American brand, a top official told ET, adding that the company plans to invest $100 million in the next 3-5 years to expand capacity.VVDN is aiming to take advantage of the shift of global companies away from China and be the first Indian manufacturer to have design capabilities in-house, without support from a technology partner.“We are investing in designing phones. We have already taken that initiative, and we are building a 5G phone as we speak for the North American market. We already have a customer, and the designs are in advanced stages,” Vivek Bansal, president, VVDN, told ET.Bansal said that the company is not only looking at design, but also manufacturing smartphones, despite not being part of the production-linked incentive scheme for mobile phones.“We are building the whole piece and it should be ready in the next couple of months. This will have both design and manufacturing aspects,” he said, adding that the company is closely working with supply chain partners like Qualcomm and MediaTek for sourcing components.The server-manufacturer also has original designs for laptops and tablets and is presently engaging with local brands to source from them. “We are pushing the OEMs (original equipment makers) who have been in the habit of getting things from outside. We are encouraging them to source goods locally,” Bansal said, adding that the ongoing shift away from China has been beneficial in attracting customers.“Most OEMs in North America, we were working with them on the engineering side, but we were not manufacturing. For that, they would go to China. But now they are coming to us in India asking you are already designing, why don’t you manufacture too?,” the executive said.In anticipation of increasing orders, VVDN is investing in a large manufacturing unit near Coimbatore, measuring over 100 acres. “It is going to have massive capacity. In the first phase, we will operationlise about 500,000 square feet, with volumes driving the investment as it increases,” Bansal said. The company plans to invest $100 million in the next 3-5 years as part of the required investment under the three production-linked schemes it is a part of.The factory will also house a printed-circuit board fabrication unit, for which it is in talks with companies from Japan and Taiwan, in a bid to reduce lead times in acquiring complex PCBs for its servers and other products. “We are working very aggressively on the component side with already a high amount of backward integration. We have our own tooling, injection moulding, die casting, sheet metal, which we do internally. Next will be the PCB,” Bansal said.