Thales is expanding its presence in India with the opening of its Global Engineering Competence Centre (ECC) in Bengaluru. The facility is intended to accelerate innovation and digital transformation to serve the needs of both the Indian market, and the Thales group’s wider global objectives. The centre will be headed up by P Satish Menon, who brings 30 years of expertise in the fields of engineering, R&D and program management.
Initially, the ECC will dedicate activities to high value-added systems in inflight entertainment and connectivity (IFEC), as well as air traffic management, avionics, cockpit, flight management, radar software, and various defense sector systems. The ECC will also concentrate on the creation of capabilities in advanced hardware technology such as radar and communication equipment, high-performance processing units and in airborne digital processing functions.
Thales views the ECC as playing a major role in job creation and skill development in India, with a target to hire 3,000 engineers in the next three to five years, along with its partners. This recruitment drive will benefit from the Indian government’s proactive policy to develop R&D and create high value-added infrastructure, with hundreds of thousands of highly qualified engineers trained in the country every year with a view to India positioning itself as the largest engineering resource in the world.
“India is an innovative country with a great pool of skilled engineers. This is why we extend our 65 yea- long journey in the country and our global engineering footprint with the launch of our Group Engineering Competence Centre in Bengaluru,” stated Pascale Sourisse, senior executive vice-president of international development at Thales. “This center is uniquely positioned to serve all domains that Thales operates in and cater to worldwide markets. With our plans of hiring over 3,000 engineers in the coming years, we look forward to significantly contributing to the ‘Skill India’ initiative and innovation in the country.”
