Wednesday, September 21, 2005

ABB to Shift Engineering R&D to India

ABB, the European power company, is planning to shift its high-end engineering research from high-cost centers to India.
Sten Jakobsson, President and CEO, ABB Sweden, revealed that the company plans to cut back on operations in high-cost centers such as Germany, Sweden and the US and shift work to India. These centers focus on power technologies and automation, among other things.

The company plans to augment its research operations in India, and the number of engineers employed at its corporate research center in Bangalore is slated to nearly double to 500 by next year.

Jakobsson added that the Indian engineers were responsible for development and engineering work in integrated circuit control systems, engineering core systems and processing systems. There were also about 200 people in engineering services within pulp and paper industry and metals industry.

According to Jakobsson, there was a dramatic increase in outsourcing of engineering services to India, both for development of projects within the company and for projects ABB gets from customers, which helped to keep costs low for its total engineering capacity.

The company has nine corporate research centers - one each in Finland, Germany, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, US, India and China. The Indian center was opened in 2002, followed by one in China in 2005.

India operations are currently focused on meeting R&D demands of ABB's software-intensive products and systems.


Reported by Business Standard

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