RLE, the German automotive engineering services company, has pledged investments of approximately 10-15% of its revenues for expanding its India based operations.
The firm is set to expand and capitalize on new business opportunities over a period of five years according to its top officials familiar with the development. The company issued a statement where its investment plan for this year was set at 500, 000 euros. The next four years will see this being ramped up to around 750, 000 euros throughout the next four years. This will generate euro 20 million or INR 140 crore of revenue in 2020 and this signifies growth volumes of 30% per annum.
This investment will be made primarily in headcount expansion, opening a Pune based centre of excellence and development facilities over five years according to the chief executive at RLE, Robert Parvez Rupa. The Cologne headquartered and privately held company has experience of three decades and is worth approximately 100 million euros. It had earlier developed design and software development centers at Chennai and Bangalore. It posted revenues of euro 5 million (INR 35 crore) for the calendar year 2014. The company will be scaling up staff strength from 250 to 1,000 engineers by the year 2020.
The company provides manufacturing and product services to suppliers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) pertaining to body and vehicle, chassis, power-train, CAM, CAD, die engineering, body shop engineering, simulation and stamping solutions. RLE India’s client roster contains big names like Audi, Daimler, Volkswagen, General Motors, Chrysler, BMW, ABB, Ford, Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra and Toyota. The Indian arm of the company is now planning to offer end to end engineering solutions to its clients by leveraging significant global capabilities at considerably lower costs in India.
The offshore delivery of the company was started around a decade back and their expansion comes in line with the launch of new models and prevailing optimism surrounding the automobile segment in India which is slated to be the third largest car market in the world by 2020. The company might even be looking at foraying into production from design with these strategic moves according to automobile experts.