Six Crucial Tech Companies You’ve Never Heard Of

For most electronic equipment, the brand on the device is not necessarily the name of the company that owns the factory where it was put together. Singapore-based Flextronics is a good example. You don’t own anything with a “Flextronics” label on it, but the company made $24.1 billion in revenue off of any number of gadgets that probably lurk in your house. They have a hand in building inkjets for HP; phones for Motorola, RIM and Sony Ericsson; power supplies for Dell PCs and hard drives for Western Digital. They made it possible for software giant Microsoft to put out hardware like the Zune and the XBox, and they were intimately enough involved in the iPad manufacturing supply chain that one of their directors was able to sell insider secrets about Apple’s plans to hedge funds. They probably didn’t make your toilet or your breakfast cereal, but you can’t be too sure. Pictured: Flextronics execs pose with Mexican President Felipe Calderón. Mexico is one of 30 countries where Flextronics maintains a manufacturing presence.

The Tata Group is a sprawling business empire, one of India’s largest, oldest and most storied companies. Tata Consultancy Services began as an in-house computer services division, but quickly started taking in clients from other companies, then other countries. Today it has more than 200,000 employees — many of whom are doing the sorts of things you expect out of an Indian outsourcing firm, toiling on software projects for big companies in the West: two recent clients include CUA, a major Australian credit union, and Air Liquide, which provides services to natural gas distributors (see how these “services” firms form staggering worldwide chains of outsourcing?). Much of the code that runs behind the websites and businesses you interact with has been built by Tata. Pictured: Tata Consultancy Services CEO N. Chandrasekaran.

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