India’s growing market for aerospace engineering services will fuel demand for more graduates as companies look to scale up operations to meet potential business from the civil aerospace sector and defence offsets.
Currently, aerospace engineering services segment is under 10% of India’s $15-billion industry largely led by the electronics and automotive sectors. ?It’s still a relatively small market when you compare it to automotive, but I think over the next couple of years things are likely to change dramatically,? said Warren Harris, president and COO, Tata Technologies Inc which plans to hire 2,000 engineers next fiscal year. ?There are a number of defence programmes likely to be sourced and a continuing upswing in commercial aerospace will stimulate a tremendous amount of demand here in India.?
Currently, aerospace contributes about 23% of the company’s total revenue which is likely to touch $300 million this fiscal. Tata Technologies, which expects to clock revenue of $500 million by 2015, aims to be the first billion dollar engineering services firm in India partly through acquisitions, Harris said. ?In the next one or two years, we should reach the critical mass after which we should take off,? said Salil Kumar, executive director of Rail, Metro and Corporate at BEML, adding that many expatriates are looking at the opportunity in India after the meltdown. ?A lot of people will get hired, will get repatriated back to India.?
An analysis conducted by Axis Aerospace and Technologies based on the usage of a key aerospace design tool suggests that there are some 3,900 aerospace designers and engineers in the country.
?If you look at a country like Germany, easily there will be about 80,000 to 90,000 people. So there is a void to fill up, a huge gap,? said S Ravinarayan, chairman and CEO of Axis, whose revenues largely come from design of aerostructures.