aviation market will require more than
1,000 aircraft worth $138 billion in the
next 20 years. In conversation with
ET, CEO Tom Enders said the European
aviation major will expand the India engineering centre and subcontract
more work to Indian firms such as
Mahindra, and Wipro . Excerpts from the interview: What role are India and China going to
play in the global aviation industry?
First of all, for us India and China,
obviously, are huge markets in the
future. And I believe we have seen
nothing yet. These markets are still in their initial phase.
To give you an idea,
US had 750 million passengers last
year and it has a population of 300
million. India had 120 million
passengers and India has a
population four times as large as US. To cite an example, in India in one day
on the trains, you have the aviation
population for almost an entire year.
These are early stages. There is more
than 16% increase in air traffic in India
in 2009-2010, very similar to China. But that is not all. We clearly see that all
the bright engineers in future will not
just sit in Europe, where Airbus has its
main activities, but we are looking for
the best and the brightest all over the
world and certainly here in India. And the experience we have with these
engineering centres here in India is
very encouraging. We started in 2007,
we were just 25 people, we are now
180, we intent to ramp it up in the
next three years to at least 400 and that would necessarily not be the end
point. So it is not only the sales activity,
but also tapping into the pool of the
best and the brightest engineering
talent in India and elsewhere. And
obviously we have subcontracting going on here in India, this will also
increase.
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