The Bosch India Group is on a roll. On Monday, Bosch Limited-the Group's flagship company in India-reported a nearly 29% increase in its net profit at Rs 281 crore for the third quarter of this fiscal, on account of higher sales volume as well as improvement in material and personnel cost. And today Bosch made headlines with its plans to hire up to 10,000 engineers over the next few years to work on futuristic technologies at its domestic R&D centre.
India is home to the Bosch Group's largest development centre outside of Germany, already employing around 18,500 R&D associates at its locations in Adugodi (Bangalore) and Coimbatore. Soumitra Bhattacharya, President of Bosch Group India, told The Economic Times that the company will invest between Rs 500 crore and Rs 800 crore in each of the next two years in India to expand local operations, including in R&D to develop products for global market. "We spend a lot of money on Internet of Things [IoT], especially to provide mobility solutions, and we see a strong future in this area," he added.
The last major recruitment drive was announced back in September 2016 while inaugurating the first phase of Bosch's new $50 million R&D centre in Bangalore. But even then the company was eyeing people for its engineering operations-as many as 3,000 of them-to work in areas like artificial intelligence and data analytics.
Meanwhile, at the recent Bosch Technology Exposition 2018, Bosch announced that it is firmly committed to the vision of electromobility and demonstrated its indigenously developed, fully electric high-voltage vehicle systems with the 400 Volt, 85kW powertrain, among the first of its kind in the Indian market.
The company has also revealed plans to significantly increase the extent of localization of its electrified portfolio in India. "As a tier-I supplier, it's our responsibility to come up with solutions. We are not going to wait for the policy to develop new solutions. We cannot be fence sitters," Bosch India Mobility Solutions Chief Technology Officer Jan Oliver Rohrl recently said. As a step in that direction, Bosch India has set up a new "Agile Project House", which is working on prototype development and system integration to feasibly get electric vehicles and electromobility solutions on Indian streets. "This will increase our local competence to be able to supply customized technologies for flexible, affordable and efficient urban mobility," said Bhattacharya.
Bosch, however, will continue to focus on the internal combustion engine space, which not only contributes substantially to its revenues but will continue to dominate the streets in the medium term. According to Bhattacharya, India is in a nascent stage when it comes to charging infrastructure and it will require a lot of work to build up the required ecosystem. The business daily quoted Bosch saying that by 2030, pure electric vehicles would comprise only 10% of total vehicles globally and not exceed 18% of the total even in a best-case scenario.
With PTI inputs