JOIN USTo meet the rising demand in the Indian market, Automotive components major Bosch on Wednesday said that it will invest Rs 1,700 crore in India over the next three years.
Bosch has been investing heavily in India. Chairman of the board of management of the Bosch Group Volkmar Denner said the Adugodi location is being revamped from a manufacturing facility into a technology hub.
"Over the past three years, we have invested more than Rs 370 crore to create this smart campus (in Adugodi) which is home to 3,650 of our 18,000 engineers in India," Denner said, adding, additional investments of Rs 600 crore are planned for further expansion of Adugodi.
In 2017, the Bosch Group registered total sales of around 2 billion euros (approximately Rs 15,784 crore) in the Indian market – this is a solid double-digit sales growth of 15.4% in euro terms.
Denner sees a promising future for the automotive market in India. "India continues to offer promising opportunities for our business and our broad product range. According to the latest global data, India has overtaken Germany to become the fourth largest automotive market in the world. Automobile sales in Asia’s third largest economy, including passenger and commercial vehicles, grew by 9.5% last year," Denner said.
In terms of new business, last year, Bosch set up an artificial intelligence centre in Bengaluru, and its newly established Connected Mobility Solutions division is active in India too.
Apart from Bengaluru, there are two other AI centres- Sunnyvale, California and Renningen, Germany. It is also planning a fourth location in China.
"We apply AI to optimise processes in manufacturing, engineering, and supply chain management, and to enable intelligent services. In India, Bosch has also recently set up the Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and AI at IIT Madras with annual funding of Rs 4 crore (0.5 million euros) for the next five years. This centre will set a precedent in the way big data is used to improve problem-solving capabilities in the industrial domain," he informed.
In the future, artificial intelligence will be a key component of Bosch products. "All our products will either possess that intelligence themselves, or AI will have played a key role in their development or manufacture," he said.
Talking about electrification, he said that Bosch believes in electric future. On the Indian government's vision to make the country an all-electric vehicle market by 2031, Denner opined that the time frame is short and that for electric vehicles on road, there is a need to empower electrical grid and charging infrastructure for all vehicles.
"Electrification in India is expected to gain momentum via fleet operators, for which the prerequisite is shared and connected mobility. We believe it will take off much more rapidly in small-vehicle segments," he added.