Bosch outlines Rs 2,200 crore investment plan

Bosch India has announced an investment plan of Rs 2,200 crore for 2012-13, its head of automotive buisness, Dr Bernd Bohr said at a press conference ahead of the Auto Expo in Delhi. A substantial portion of the amount will go towards expanding the company’s local activities that includes a plant that will manufacture electrical drives in Chennai as well as expansion of the company’s facilities at Nashik and Jaipur and a new unit at Ahmedabad. The investment, he said, would be funded through internal accruals and surpluses generated by Bosch in India.

At Jaipur, the company has commissioned new hangars in order to ramp up production. A new facility is also under construction at Ahmedabad which will manufacture hydraulic valves, power units and cylinders.

Dr Bohr said that Bosch’s joint venture with ZF Steering Systems has entered into an agreement to supply electric power steering to a few Tata vehicles. These have been developed by a team of Indian, Chinese and German engineers and is called the Value Motronic engine management platform. It has been designed, Dr Bohr said, for emerging markets.

On the technology front, Bosch experts in India are set to assume global responsibility in software engineering support for ECUs. Their development work will focus on ECUs for vehicles with both conventional and hybrid drivetrains. This is clearly an indication of the increasing importance of the Indian market for Bosch worldwide. In 2011, Bosch’s Nashik plant has seen production of nozzle holders rise to 26,500 units a day from 17,000 units. DSLA nozzle output has increased from 18,000 units a day to 30,5000 units.

On the financial side, sales of the Bosch Group in India, as per preliminary estimates, are expected to touch Rs 11,000 crore in 2011, a year-on-year growth of about 20 percent. In 2011, the company added 4,000 more employees to its roll call which takes its strength to 25,000 employees or associates as Bosch refers to them.

On the safety products front, Dr Bohr said that while 13 percent of Indian vehicles have ABS, the company is geared to meeting growing demand for ABS. Bosch makes ABS systems at its Pune facility which number 300,000 ABS systems for passenger cars. According to Bosch, by the year 2015, 90 percent of all new vehicles worldwide are expected to be fitted with ABS systems, up from 75 percent last year.

Interestingly, Bosch worldwide has developed an affordable ABS system for two-wheelers. Two generations of this product were on display at the Bosch stall at the Auto Expo. The system has been developed in Japan and has contributed to motorcycle safety worldwide. It remains to be seen if this will, one day, make its way here to India which has a large and growing motorcycle population. On other fronts, Bohr said Bosch plans to sell seven million petrol direct injection systems worldwide by 2013, thrice as many as in 2010, and it hopes to sell 12 million common-rail injection systems as well.

While Bosch has several hundred engineers working on hybrid and e-mobility solutions, Bohr said that the company’s outlook on electric vehicles is conservative. Going forward, he expects just three percent of plug-in hybrids and six percent of pure hybrids. India won’t figure now but could be part of the second wave of e-driven vehicles. Overall, Bosch says it sees strong potential for small e-vehicles, especially for commuting in megacities.

Overall, Bosch remains bullish on India where it expects the number of cars per 1,000 persons to rise from 12 to 35 per 1,000 by the year 2025.

The company’s global automotive technology business was 28.1 million euros in 2010 and Bosch expects a 30 percent increase going forward. Last year, Bosch invested an estimated 3.3 billion euros in R&D globally in automotive technologies. The headcount in the automotive business has gone up by 10,000 to 177,000 employees.