Marking a century in India, German technology major Bosch has announced that it will invest Rs 2,000 crore in India by 2026 for the advanced automotive technologies and digital mobility space. The company says it has over the years invested around Rs 900 crore annually at group level in the country.

Dr Stefan Hartung, chairman of the board of management, said “Bosch India has brought together the best of German engineering and Indian entrepreneurship to develop innovative products across all segments.”

Dr Soumitra Bhattacharya, MD, Bosch and president Bosch Group in India said “Bosch’s 100-year journey in India is a testament to the passion, hard work, and dedication of our associates. I sincerely thank our associates for the part they have played in this. Bosch India will remain true to its roots and evolve, innovate, and spark the next wave of big-ticket products and services. We will continue to pursue this vision for a digital, sustainable, efficient, self-reliant, and future-ready India.”

The company says it will continue to invest in technology-neutral powertrain business. It believes that India’s quest for sustainable mobility alternate fuel vehicles can be intermediary for reaching electrification in certain segments and help tackle the challenges of price, charging and other factors.  

The German technology estimates that by 2030, every third new vehicle in India will be an EV. At the same time, dependent on use case / customer strategy, the ICE-vehicles could also be electrified with mild and strong hybrids. The ICE remains an important part of the powertrain mix especially in commercial vehicles and off-highway segments.

Responding to a question on how the company sees electrification in India, Sandeep Nelamangala, executive director and executive VP - Mobility Solutions, Bosch India, said, that the two- and three-wheeler space is expected to see a headstart (in electrification), while there are also developments happening in the passenger vehicle space. "In the two-wheeler space we already have scalable drives, hub drives, 48 volt systems among others. We are now looking at this tech for the three-wheeler and light mobility segment. In 4-wheeler space we are working with OEMs for standard axle and in the CV space – hydrogen and fuel-cell."

Acknowledging the challenge of the semiconductors in the mobility space, he said, "We are staying in close connect with OE customers in India to try and find alternate technical solutions to mitigate the situation." 

Furthermore, the company says it is working to make safety technology affordable supporting the government vision to reduce road accidents by over 50 percent by 2025. Bosch India says it has invested Rs 380 crore over the last 10 years and an additional Rs 238 crore is planned over the next 5 years in safety domain.

Mobility marketplace and aftermarket
As part of its future vision, the company launched two new products – Mobility Marketplace, a one-stop online platform for all mobility solutions and Mobility Cloud Platform, a cloud-based launchpad and ecosystem for developing, implementing and scaling IoT-enabled digital products for advanced connected mobility solutions.

The digital marketplace is an innovation plus transactional platform, which focuses on improving utilisation and efficiency elements across the ecosystem. It is a neutral platform with digital assets focused on mobility solutions powered by Bosch expertise in mobility domain. The company says not only will the marketplace provide significant value for buyers by offering curated and secured content, but will also enable sellers to generate additional revenue channels through new business models. The platform aims to expand the portfolio of digital assets from APIs to data to end-to-end solutions, services and hardware covering a wide range of services in an automotive lifecycle such as road/ weather data, telematics, navigation, point-of-interest services (parking, EV infra among others).

On the other hand, the cloud platform aims to address the challenges faced in digital product innovation in the mobility domain. It will helps customers to focus on their core product features, optimising their lifetime product costs by upto 25 percent and improving the time to market by upto 3 times.

Furthermore, the company says it will also partner Industrial Training Institutes (it is) and government interventions to skill people to increase their employability by 2030.

Bosch opened its first sales agency in Kolkata in 1922. And now has established 18 manufacturing facilities and 7 development and application centers, employing close to 31,500 associates.