Nokia Siemens to ramp up India investments

New Delhi: Even as Nokia Siemens Networks has globally announced cost-cutting measures, the telecom equipment maker is increasing investments into India.

The company has decided to ramp up its India operations in three core areas of mobile broadband, manufacturing and Global Network Operations Centres.

Hub of transformation
“India will be the hub of the transformation that NSN has initiated globally. Investments into India are being ramped up in key focus areas, including global delivery centres and manufacturing. So all of these facilities which gives us global scale and advantage of centralisation is being ramped up,” Mr Sandeep Girotra, head of Nokia Siemens in India, told Business Line.

NSN had earlier announced that it will cut 17,000 staff worldwide as part of a major global restructuring to focus on more profitable operations.

The company, which is jointly owned by Nokia and Siemens, is looking to improve profitability by reducing operating expenses and overheads by €1 billion by the end of 2013.

While the exact impact of this on NSN's India operations is not known, Mr Girotra said that 95 per cent of the work being done in the country fits in with the company's new global strategy.

New strategy
“The details are still not worked at the concept level. But this doesn't change the fact India is a priority market. Be it services or mobile broadband or manufacturing India is an important leg to NSN's global story. Only about 5-7 per cent of the business in Indian is not in the big picture which are being cleaned up,” Mr Girotra said.

He said the new global strategy was necessitated because the industry was going through a rapid transformation. “As a vendor we cannot be everything to everyone anymore. We need to be big in the areas where we want to play in. Concept of one stop shop is not relevant anymore.

“Therefore, the growth areas will be mobile broadband, customer experience, and optical. So, we are putting more investments into these areas and our India operations fits in well with this,” he said.