Fujitsu Limited, a leading global information and communications technology corporation, says it will double its India headcount in the next 12 months, according to Vivek Mahajan, the Global Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the company.
The Japanese firm is the world’s sixth-largest IT services provider with operations in 180 countries, annual revenues of $34 billion. It offers a wide range of products, services and solutions. However, till now it has had only 7,000 employees in India, of its total global headcount of 1,29,000.
This is in stark contrast to most of its global competitors, like IBM, Accenture and Capgemini which have anywhere between a fifth to third of their global workforce based out of India. The India headquartered companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Tech, of course, leverage the local talent base for their global operations.
Speaking to BusinessLine, Mahajan explained the reason for the conservative scaling the company has done in the country till now. “India for us is not a cost-arbitrage play but more of a value play, in terms of the kind of work we do from here. We don’t view India merely as a low-cost location, rather we look at the skill base. Which is why we are now doubling our India headcount at our development centres from 7,000 to 14,000 in the next 12 months,” he said.
New R&D centres
The company has development centres in Pune, Chennai, Noida, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Mahajan said talent availability in India was also the reason why Fujitsu earlier this week announced the setting up of a R&D centre in collaboration with Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad to work in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
“Even in the R&D centre it is not the headcount. We may have, say 50 people by 2024, but they will work on world-class innovation that can help in solving technological, societal and environmental challenges. Strengthening our presence in India will allow us to tap into the enormous potential offered by world class researchers with local institutions and universities that drive global software technology development,” the CTO added.
‘Tapping India’s potential’
Even though Fujitsu has R&D facilities in Japan, USA and Israel, amongst others, Mahajan said the newly setup India unit “has the potential to become the biggest research centre outside Japan, given the talent available here”.
While the R&D with the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad will focus on AI technology to discover causal relationships with higher accuracy, the collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science will centre on technology to automatically generate AI, through autonomous training in response to various environmental changes.