Fujitsu, Hitachi to outsource software development to India

By agencies   |   Monday, 23 October 2006, 19:30 IST
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Tokyo: Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd and other Japanese technology companies plan to farm out software development to India in order to lower costs and cope with staffing shortages, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported, without citing sources. The move is also seen as an effort by these firms, which have been sending development work to China for some time, to hedge their bets amid a dwindling pool of engineers and a rapidly declining population. Fujitsu plans to hire 2,000 engineers by fiscal 2009 for its own development projects at the Indian operations of US firm Rapidigm, which it acquired in February, the business daily said. Fujitsu has 1,000 engineers working in China, mainly at its own local operations, as well as 500 in Southeast Asia, but it intends to increase that figure to 5,000 by fiscal 2009, with 2,000 engineers in India, 2,000 in China and 1,000 in Southeast Asia, it said. Hitachi also plans to increase the number of engineers in India to 540 from 470 at its three local partners during the current fiscal year and the additional workers will be involved in the development of so-called middleware, a sophisticated type of business software, the Nihon Keizai said. For its part, NEC Corp will set up a team of 400 engineers to develop control software for mobile phones in a joint venture with a local partner, as it seeks to position India as its second software development base, after China.

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