India is the likely candidate for Volkswagen’s next engineering hub.
The carmaker is considering establishing an engineering and development centre in India, and making it the lead country in defining the future product portfolio for markets around the world.
If you get India right, you will fix the rest of the world, said the company’s global head of sales and marketing, Jurgen Stackmann in a comment to The Economic Times.
“We have a strong presence in India, but we don’t have a sufficiently strong engineering presence in India to make this as a future engineering hub for our work.
“India already has 9-10 big engineering and development hubs from other brands. We are very keen to look at India from that perspective as well.”
According to Stackmann, India could be a centre for software development and R&D.
The potential establishment of India as an engineering hub for Volkswagen is part of the company’s “regionalisation strategy”, which aims to empower the market regions.
Previously, the company developed all of its cars for Europe, and simply deployed them around the world. This was found not to work in India however, which Stackmann has attributed to the fact that different countries have different quality standards.
He added that India is the toughest market in the world, thus making it a reference point for finding solutions for “an aggressively low priced market”.