India will take huge leap over China because of its software development st

What’s been your experience with Indian automakers till date?

In the past, we haven’t made a conscious effort to reach out to them because there wasn’t a market for us. It is very eminent for us to talk to them now and help them get our products for their mid and high-end cars. Talks are going to intensify over the next few months with Indian OEMs and we are hopeful of good business with them.

What’s your focus on the aftermarket?

That is one segment we want to play a very aggressive role with our JBL, Infinity and Harman/Kardon brands. That seems to be a market fairly large. I understand about 1.5 million cars are equipped annually with aftermarket products. And we have done very little in the aftermarket.

How big is the R&D centre in Bangalore and what kinds of projects are likely to come to India?

We have a combined strength of 300 people in the Wipro as well as our own R&D centre in Bangalore. Our target is to take it to 1,000 people in five years. It’s amazing how our Indian engineers have learnt our processing and our projects so quickly. We moved large groups of engineers from India to Germany for training. With that experience, they are already handling projects for big German carmakers like Mercedes and BMW. There is no boundary between our German and Indian operations. In fact, India is an extension of our German operations.

We have already started giving good size of the value chain, offering complete project packages to the Indian centre. Recently, we have got a $2 billion order from BMW and Mercedes and our Indian engineers are already aware of what role they would need to play in these projects. We face a different problem in our effort to scale up the centres in India. We are struggling to find enough good people to recruit and train them in Germany or the US or get expats to come and train them here. That is not happening quickly enough. We are now getting our global head of HR to India to speed up the process here.

We have a pleasant dilemma that we have work, but the unpleasant thing about this is that we don’t have enough good people to allocate the work packages to. Having said that, we are confident Harman would have the most competitive and capable knowledge base in India among all competitors outside of Germany or the US. Both India and China are potentially large markets, but India would take a huge leap because of its strength in software development.

Seventy percent of the core value in our systems comes from application software.

Talk us through your distribution strategy.

For our professional business, we have a large distributor who has 200 touch points across India. We have almost the same arrangement for our consumer electronics business. But I’m not too happy with the current set up. We need to step up our distribution channels, and we can do so in two ways – poach some existing distributors or hire new distributors. We have a team that is exploring inorganic opportunities. There are some interesting players, and we are trying to partner with them or bring them into the family. For the automotive business, our intent would be very different. We mainly work with our global OEMs, because they have the desire to sell more cars in the Indian market. They want to know if Harman