From working with start-ups to making more in the State, Airbus is looking at number of areas to enhance its engagement in Telangana.
“We are looking at multiple opportunities,” president and managing director, Airbus India and South Asia, Anand Stanley said during a media interaction at the Wings India 2020 here on Thursday.
Noting that it was in discussion with the State government, he said that skill upgradation programme, engaging with start-ups for some cutting-edge work and scaling up its design operations figure in the list. The aircraft manufacturer also sees opportunities emerging in the urban mobility in future, in the shape of urban air taxies, helicopters or heli ambulances as well as in defence manufacturing in the region.
At present, Airbus’ major engagements in Hyderabad is in the form of collaboration with Infosys and the Tata Group. “In Hyderabad, we have recently started operations on the engineering and IT side. We have a 150-people centre, which we are doing in collaboration with Infosys… also do some [component] manufacturing work with Tata Group that we want to expand significantly,” he said.
Mr. Stanley, who was speaking after sharing details of India Market Forecast of Airbus till 2034, said, “India is at the forefront of global aviation growth… with our world-class engineering and training centres and 45-strong supplier network, Airbus’ industrial footprint in India has set new standards among international aircraft manufacturers.”
Every Airbus commercial aircraft is partly made in India. “We are working to double our sourcing volumes from the country to more than US$1 billion by 2025,” he added. From $500 million, it has grown to $650 with the incremental portion coming in equal portions from Airbus’ Make in India as well as Design in India work.
Responding to a query on whether the COVID-19 outbreak impacted spares supply from China, he said, “We have multiple redundancies at global level and we do not depend on any one country in particular. Our spares network is global in nature and has multiple sources of sourcing, including India where we have significant amount of our spares and component base.”