Multinational from the Americas, Europe, and APAC have set up research hubs to work in the areas of R&D, Business Process Management and IT. More than 1,000 multinational companies have established engineering and research and development centers — known as global in-house centers or GICs — in India. Among these are Target, JCPenney, AB (Anheuser-Busch) Inbev, Saks Fifth Avenue and Grant Thornton.
“Conversations are no longer about cost. It is digital technology that is bringing companies here,” says K. S. Viswanathan, IT industry body NASSCOM’s head of industry initiatives whose responsibility includes dealing with GICs.
Graduating from processing and outsourcing work, India’s digital engineers today work in big data and analytics, mobility, artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet-of-things (IoT), blockchain, and robotics.
Engineering teams across healthcare, aviation, transportation, power and energy, oil and gas, IT, R&D among other areas, are employed in the multinationals mentioned below:
Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Broadridge, Fiserv, Misys, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, NetApp, EMC, Mercedes-Benz, Walmart, Lowe’s, L Brands (Victoria’s Secret), JCPenney, Saks Fifth Avenue, Target, Ann Taylor, GE, Honeywell, Airbus, Boeing, Shell, ABB, Fiat Chrysler, General Motors, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Subaru, Kia, Samsung, Panasonic, Daimler. (This list of multinationals is not exhaustive.)
India has Daimler’s biggest R&D presence outside of its home base, Germany. Thomas Weber, adviser to Daimler AG, and a former member of the board of management of Daimler said, “In every Mercedes car, there’s a huge part of India.”
Adobe: Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign — are entirely developed and managed out of India
Harman’s India research center: Indian engineers designed a cost-effective hardware and a simpler software architecture that embraced open source technology systems for Fiat Chrysler, GM, Volkswagen, Hyundai and India’s Tata Motors.
“If you challenge Indians and say, here’s the product, take this, reverse engineer it, bring down the cost to a third of what it is…they will do it. Indians are creative geniuses,” Dinesh Paliwal, president and CEO of Harman International said.
The transformation has become the subject of a study by the Harvard Business School.
