The Hindu Business Line : DuPont plans to double manpower in India

Hyderabad, March 25 DuPont, the global $29.4-billion turnover company, plans to double its manpower in India, and launch its fully operational DuPont Knowledge Centre (DKC) in June-July 2008.

The agro-chemical giant has 800 employees at its six manufacturing units, located in three sites — Vadodara, Madurai and Hyderabad. The manpower doubling is targeted for the next two to three years.

With a growth of 28 per cent and turnover of $439 million ($361 million) in 2007, the company is in for big growth, said Mr Balvinder S. Kalsi, President and CEO of DuPont India.

The DKC, coming up in Hyderabad, will see an investment of Rs 150 crore on equipment and facilities alone. While the Biotech Centre will be operational in the first week of April, the entire facility would be ready by June-end, he told newspersons here on Tuesday.

Research facilities

The DKC will also have two additional facilities, the Materials Research Centre and the Engineering Centre. “We are also planning more Centres of Excellence in Hyderabad and elsewhere,” Mr Kalsi said, without divulging details.

The Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) and Executive Vice-President of DuPont, Dr Thomas M. Connelly, said “Our markets in future would come from developing countries and not just historically from developed nations. Therefore, we are focussing on the strengths and markets here.”

The DKC, which is the first to be called Knowledge Centre against its five other Research and Development (R&D) centres across the globe, will focus on agro and industrial biotechnology, renewable and material science, nanotechnologies, clean technologies and generate intellectual property for the company, he explained.

It would be a 24x7 R&D facility, which will strive to reduce time to market research, have an intellectual property centre and be part of global projects in research for DuPont. It should add to the strong global research pipeline that has delivered strong results for the company in 2007.

The sales from new products based on technologies developed in-house rose to 36 per cent ($10 billion) in 2007, compared to 34 per cent in 2006. Our target is to reach 42 per cent by 2010. The company’s technical spend is $1.7 billion ($1.4 billion only on R&D), and it has 5,000 scientists working on a wide range of areas, he said.

The Director of DKC, Dr Homi Bedwar, said by end of 2008 the facility will house 300 scientists and engineers. The strength would be doubled in two to three years. Collaborations with Indian research institutes are also planned.

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