The k2p blog

Airbus A 320: Wikipedia

The Telegraph:

Airbus expects India to need around 1,000 new planes over the next 20 years, compared with 3,000 in China. Air traffic has expanded by 16pc in India this year.

Airbus, which has 68 per cent Indian market share, as measured by orders, believes it can build on its current success by selling more aircraft. The European plane maker is also building relationships on the ground. It has 25 partners in India, eight of them top-tier suppliers. Airbus is also leaning more and more on Indian engineers.

The company will decide this week whether to go ahead with its next development programme, a new engine for the single-aisle A320 plane that generates much of Airbus’s profit. “Airbus has never made a secret that our engineering resources are stretched thin,” Mr Enders said during a two-day visit to Airbus’s Indian operations in Bangalore last week. “We’re taking this decision very seriously because we cannot afford that other programmes, especially the 350, should suffer.”

At its base in Bangalore, Airbus has 160 engineers working on the A350 and A380 programmes in conjunction with staff in France, Germany and Britain. The company plans to have 200 staff at the engineering centre by the end of the year and 400 by 2013. India produces around 350,000 engineering graduates a year, about 25pc of which Airbus describes as “employable”. “I don’t think 400 is going to be the final number, there is a huge pool of talent we can tap into,” said Mr Enders. “In terms of the work we sub-contract, there’s a lot more to come.”

In the past, most of the work done for Airbus by external suppliers has been making parts of the airframe, and while some manufacturing work is now being done in India, it is the engineering and technology base that is more attractive, Mr Enders said. “IT, simulations, technical publication – all these are things which India is particularly good at,” he said.

It makes sense and is inevitable that more will shift to India and China – where the market is.

Tags: Airbus, Bangalore, engineering, India

This entry was posted on October 3, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Engineering, India, Technology, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.