Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions Ltd (RBEI) has announced that it is setting up a centre for powertrain electronics, which will work with Bosch's Diesel and Gasoline Systems - Electronic Controls (DGS-EC) business unit.

Hiring plans

As part of the DGS-EC project, RBEI will hire over 800 engineers in Bangalore and Coimbatore over the next two years and spend around Rs 300 crore on expansion plans in the same period. Overall, company plans to hire a total of 1,700 engineers in 2011, including the engineers hired for DGS-EC.

Mr Vijay Ratnaparkhe, Managing Director, RBEI, said, “Initially, we worked on parts of some projects, but now, we will be moving on to complete projects.” The India centre will be the first global centre for DGS-EC outside of Germany and explaining the rationale for this, Mr Walter Grote, Senior Vice-President, DGS-EC, explained, “We can't run all these operations from one single country. We need to decentralise.”

Global projects

Mr R.K. Shenoy, Senior Vice-President - Powertrain Electronics Systems, said that this project was the outcome of Bosch's activities in India. “In the 1990s, we served as an extended workbench for Bosch. Around 2000, we got into hardware development and now, we are going to work on global projects.”

Mr Grote said that he felt sure that the future was bright for the entity. Explaining the growth of internal combustion engines, he said that even by 2020, when around 100 million cars are expected to be manufactured worldwide, only around two to three million cars would be pure electric vehicles; the others would be hybrids, which use a combination of electric motors and an internal combustion engine. And such vehicles would use Bosch's electronic controls, he said.

Currently, around 75 million vehicles are made worldwide, and according to Mr Grote, Bosch has a 30 per cent market share in this space.