Bosch Group has announced an investment of Rs 1,700 crore in the next three years in India. The company will use this investment in offering more opportunities for its businesses along with a broader product range. According to the company officials, a majority of this amount will be used in the expansion of Bosch’s smart campus in Adugodi along with the modernisation of manufacturing facilities in India. Bosch had invested over Rs 370 crore in the last three years to create its smart campus at Adugodi that is a home to 3,650 of its 18,000 engineers in India. In order to be specific, the company has planned an additional investment of Rs 600 crore for the expansion of its smart campus.
The year 2017 has been instrumental for Bosch as it posted a growth of 15.4 percent, taking the sales to 2.2 billion Euros in the Indian market. As per the latest global data, India has beaten Germany to become the fourth largest automotive market in the world. Also, the automobile sales in Asia’s third-largest economy has grown by 9.5 percent last year. Last year, the company set up a state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence center here and its newly established ConnectedMobility Solutions division is now active in India.
Bosch also said that with India switching from BS-IV to BS-VI emission norms, the company, in collaboration with OEMs, is all set to achieve BS-VI implementation from April 2020. For this, the country will have to adopt electromobility solutions and Bosch will offer the right technology to support both initiatives. The company believes that Internal Combustion Engines will continue to be the mainstream solution for freight and commercial vehicles.
Watch our panel discussion video on future of electric mobility in India:
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Bosch India’s electrification initiatives to address the transformation in urban mobility will play a key role. Keeping in mind the country’s climate change targets, Bosch sees the co-existence of IC engines and electrification with hybridization as an interim solution. Hybrid technology will be a key contributor towards the electrification goal in India. This is primarily due to the country’s unique stop-start driving patterns and road congestion. The fleet operators and smaller vehicles tend to adopt electrification when feasible options are available in the market. Experts at Bosch believe that using synthetic fuels as a supplement to electrification will play a vital role to reduce CO2 emission.
Volkmar Denner, Chairman of Board of Management, Bosch Group says that the company wants to keep people active in mobility while improving air quality. In order to make low emissions traffic a reality, the company is investing heavily in making electromobility a market success along with enhancing the combustion engine. Both technologies are said to benefit the demand of the Indian market and with Bosch’s new diesel technology, the company’s engineers have succeeded in getting NOx emissions down massively. In order to keep things into perspective, test vehicles equipped with the enhanced technology on an average already emit not more than 13 milligrams of NOx per kilometer during road tests according to the new European RDE standard. The company says that there is a future for diesel and it will remain integral to tomorrow’s mobility solutions.
Bosch has recently established a Connected Mobility Solutions division to develop and sell digital mobility services. The company says that almost 18,000 out of its total 31,000 associates in India work in research and development (R&D). Bosch says that India plays a key role in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Numerous products in near future will be connected to artificial intelligence. These products will either possess AI themselves or AI will play a key role in their development. In 2017, the company invested 300 million Euros into its Bosch Center for Artificial intelligence (BCAI) across three continents and one of the main locations was Bengaluru, India along with centers in Sunnyvale, U.S. and Renningen, Germany.
