The world’s largest aircraft maker, Airbus, expects that the Indian 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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