India only market to promise substantial growth in next 2 years: Bosch Global Chief

Introduction of economic regulations such as GST, interventions to incentivise industrial production are key developments seen as enablers for growth, which also fuel the bullishness, said Stefan Hartung, chairman, Bosch.

For Bosch, India isn’t among its top markets yet. Home market Germany, and China are. However, the German major still has high stakes in the country, where its subsidiary Bosch India clocked sales of ₹1.67 billion (₹14,929 crore) in 2022-23. That’s because, he said, “It has contributions far beyond that sales as it’s involved in many projects globally. That gives it a special role.”

Indian engineering

The biggest stake in India for Bosch is in its Bengaluru headquartered global engineering centre, Bosch Global Software Technologies (BGSW), which has seen the number of its employees jump from 650 in 2000, to 36,000 in 2022. What was only a “Bangalore company” as Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions earlier, is now an international one with subsidiaries in Mexico and Vietnam, among other countries. “And we are also thinking about other locations,” said Hartung.

The large engineering base has expanded capabilities from being “purely only software” earlier to now hardware design, functional design, and “hardcore engineering services, Hartung said. A team of around 200 engineers in India are also involved in Bosch’s new focus area of Hydrogen technology.

Leveraging Indian manpower

Bosch has established itself as a leading player in the Indian automotive industry. For it to remain so, the focus is to tap India’s inherent frugal engineering advantage better. Efforts are to find solutions to ‘how can we make affordable electric cars? How can we make products which also work even if the infrastructure is not as developed?’ Bosch’s strategy is to use the best of both worlds – internal combustion technology expertise in the West, and the software engineering talent available in India, and make them work together.”We involve all our people intensely in joint projects globally. Because that is the game. With these new communication technologies, we have scrum work where people can do arithmetic work. And some of the project leads are in India,” said Hartung.(The correspondent was in Stuttgart-Feuerbach, Germany at the invitation of Bosch)