NEC Banking Heavily on Indian Talent and Market
Article By : Sufia Tippu
CEO Takashi Niino spills beans on local strategy in interview
BENGALURU — Japanese electronics major NEC is drawing up plans to increase its revenue from India from the current $400 million to $1 billion by 2023. The company plans to focus on its three key business domains in India — public safety, logistics and transportation — to achieve this goal.
“India is now the third-biggest market in Asia-Pacific in terms of revenue. The number of NEC employees in India (6,000) is the biggest in the region,” Takashi Niino, CEO, NEC Corporation, said in an earlier interview with a business paper, Hindu_BusinessLine.
The company is also exploring the possibility of offering its information and communications technology (ICT) solutions to the proposed bullet train project between Mumbai and Ahmedabad and expanding into the Southern and Eastern parts of India through its joint venture with Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMICDC), according to the report.
Plans afoot to make India a global hub
The company is focusing on making India the hub to serve global markets such as Africa and Middle East while reiterating that the country has the potential to become the largest market in Asia-Pacific in terms of revenue.
“India is a big potential market,” Nino said in an earlier interview with The Economic Times, He added that the company is aggressively increasing its smart cities-related engagements here besides focusing on the carriers business.
Another key executive of the Japanese company said NEC is focusing on safer city programmes through its AI and biometrics-based products. “These products will create new business models in India. And, we will try this India business model for other global market,” he said.
A measure of NEC’s strategic success is that it has already bagged a contract to provide command and control centre components and other IoT-enabled smart ICT systems for the Hubballi-Dharwad Smart city. The project is expected to go live by mid-2019.
Under the project, the company will implement an integrated command and control center (ICCC) city wide surveillance system and ICT-based solid waste management system. It will also integrate the ICCC with various other smart city elements, including and intelligent transport management system, parking management system, smart poles and a geographic information system. The ICCC will centrally track garbage collection activity through RFID tags placed around 300,000 households’ bins.
The NEC’s Indian arm, NEC Technologies India, is also in talks with the telecom department (DoT) for developing relevant 5G uses cases the report said.
The company’s India MD Takayuni Inaba said NEC “can provide its full range of products to identity-relevant 5G use cases in India”. Recently, DoT had approached NEC along with Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Cisco for development of 5G applications and running trials.
The company is also in talks with Indian telecom operators for its OSS and BSS solutions, and technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Networks Function Virtualisation (NFV).
NEC Technology inks R&D pact with IIT-Bombay for IoT, AI and big data
NEC Technologies India is deepening India ties by establishing a new lab in Mumbai and having a pact with IIT-Bombay.
The company has entered into a pact with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) to explore joint research and development in the field of big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), with an aim to solve a range of social challenge in the country.
Under the pact, the company and the IIT-Mumbai will jointly work on value creation for major government initiatives across smart cities, logistics and transportation domain.
The company said that the joint effort will explore the use of big data analytics to optimise the movement of logistics containers across the country.
Akihiko Iketani, head of NECTI’s NEC Laboratories India said that more than 30 graduates have joined the company’s central research lab in Japan since 2012.
“Through this joint effort, we aim to address social challenges posed by rapid urbanization and economic development in India, such as improving the efficiency of logistics networks, reducing road congestion and air pollution and achieving smarter and safer cities,” he added.
— Sufia Tippu is a freelance tech journalist based in India contributing to EE Times India
