Schneider Electric Industries, SAS France, a world leader in electrical distribution, industrial control and automation announced on Thursday that it was planning a global research and development centre in Bangalore.
The company, which had total sales of euro 9.1 billion in 2002, said in a statement that the activities undertaken by the Bangalore centre would span the areas of electromechanical design, electronic design (digital and analog) and software development.
"With this initiative, Schneider Electric aims to create significant extra R&D capacity and bring flexibility to its global product development organisations," it said.
Schneider Electric's decision to set up an R&D centre in India was mainly driven by the availability of a large pool of engineering and technical talent with strong product development experience and was in line with its strategy to be more global, the company said.
India forms an important part of Schneider Electric's future development plans globally in view of the rapid growth of the electrical distribution and automation market in the country, the statement said.
The establishment of such a centre in India is on the lines of a similar centre set up by Schneider Electric in Monterrey, Mexico and Shanghai, China in 1999.
Schneider Electric will leverage its past experience in setting-up and running such centres to closely integrate the Bangalore centre with global development teams, and ramp up its capabilities in the area of product design and development.
The Bangalore centre was slated to start operations next month and will have a team of 100 by the end of 2004 and was expected to ramp-up to around 300 employees within two to three years of establishment, the company said.
The centre will be set up as a division of Schneider Electric India Pvt Ltd, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Schneider Electric Industries SAS.
It said Schneider Electric India, which entered the country in 1995, had quickly established itself as a leading player in the market.
Its "technologically advanced" products were manufactured in state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in Nashik, Chennai and Baroda and were available countrywide through its widespread sales and distribution network.
