ABB may shift R&D to India

Power major ABB is planning to shift high-end engineering research from high-cost centres globally to India.

"We will cut back on operations in high-cost centres such as Germany, Sweden and the US and shift work to India," Sten Jakobsson, president and CEO, ABB Sweden, said. These centres focus on power technologies and automation, among other things.

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

"The number would probably be even more in the next couple of years. We are increasing here and decreasing numbers in the high cost countries," Jakobsson said, adding that Indian engineers did, "part of our 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. "These two areas are growing very fast," he added.

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, Jakobsson said, adding that this helped, "support and keep cost low for our total engineering capacity. India is a very important hub".

The company has nine corporate research centres- one each in Finland, Germany, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, US, India and China. The centre in India was opened in 2002, followed by one in China in 2005. India operations are currently focused on meeting research and development demands of ABB's software-intensive products and systems.

India is also a very important export market for the Nordic region, which supplies big systems such as HVDC technology here, Jakobsson said.