The Hindu Business Line : Singapore co to source engg design from India

THE Singapore-based global real estate consulting firm Meinhardt will outsource engineering designs from a new centre in Noida. The company has also decided to convert its liaison office in India into a full-fledged subsidiary.

"The Design Engineering Centre will be operational by January end and will employ about 150 engineers from different disciplines. We will send all the employees to Singapore for training and most of the department heads would be expatriates because Indians are yet to be exposed to the kind of work we do," said Mr Rajesh Srivastava, Director of Meinhardt, Singapore.

The centre will cater to the design requirements of real estate, airports and highway projects for which Meinhardt is acting as the consultant.

"Initially, we will focus on our internal requirement. But in the second phase, we will leverage the Meinhardt brand equity and offer our services to clients in the West. As of now, such work is getting outsourced to Singapore and Hong Kong due to a cost advantage of nearly 40 per cent over the US. India offers a significant price advantage to even Singapore, so we are confident that we will get a lot of work," Mr Srivastava said.

The initial investment in the centre would be about $4 million, he said, adding that it would be equipped with the best IT infrastructure to optimise civil, structural, mechanical and electrical designs.

Mr Srivastava claimed that Meinhardt is the first company to introduce the concept of "Value Engineering" in the country. "We rework designs and find ways to make the structure stronger and more utilitarian while cutting down on costs. Often, we have been able to come up with innovations that shave off the project cost by up to 15 per cent," he said.

On the company's activities in India, Mr Srivastava said that Meinhardt had been appointed the consultant for two prestigious real estate projects in Kolkata - the Rs 175-crore Silver Spring and Rs 500 crore South City.

Meinhardt is also the consultant for three projects under the National Highway Development Project being executed by the National Highways Authority of India.

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