India has lately been one of the main expansion areas for automakers when it comes to increasing their software development capability. This blog post contains data on the largest tech hubs in India for the automotive sector, looking at the biggest players among OEMs and Suppliers.
India is home to almost 75,000 pure software employees in the automotive sector. After the United States, India is the second largest player in automotive software, as discussed in the study Global automotive (OEM) tech talent footprint.
This is unsurprising, thanks to a large population, open markets, and a comparably high ratio of STEM students graduating each year from India’s technical universities.
When comparing the top automotive software employers, we see that Bosch, Tata Motors and Mercedes-Benz come out on top, with 5900, 4100, and 3500 tech employees respectively.
We decided to dive deeper into each of the 4 major automotive tech hubs: Pune, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai.
Pune is often referred to as the “Oxford of the East Pune is often referred to as the "Oxford of the East" due to the presence of numerous prestigious educational institutions. This has fostered a robust talent pool, especially in the engineering and IT sectors
For automotive tech employers, Tata, KPIT, and Bajaj are the biggest.
Hyderabad, also called “Cyderabad”, thanks to its major presence of IT firms is also home to some major automotive software employers
The biggest ones are ZF, Bosch, and Stellantis.
Bengaluru, also referred to as the "Silicon Valley of India” has one of the deepest and most extensive automotive tech ecosystems in the entire country.
The top 3 employers are Bosch, Mercedes and Continental
Lastly, Chennai, often called the “Detroit of India” thanks to its dense automotive manufacturing industry is also one of the major hubs for automotive software
In Chennai, the largest employers are Ford, Hyundai, and Ashok Leyland.
We also took a deep dive into the amount of automotive tech employees open to work in each skill & domain, here’s what we found:
In the table, we see that Bengaluru holds the largest numbers for almost all tech stacks, while Pune comes in second.
The smaller two regions, Hyderabad and Chennai have strong talent pools in both Embedded Systems and AUTOSAR
We also did a comparison to the Hashlist expertly vetted automotive talent pool, which has contains the top 5-10% of the automotive software engineers in India.
However extensive its automotive tech ecosystem may be, India is just getting started. Almost all major automotive companies either have big tech operations in the country or plans for it. For example very recently, major OEM Stellantis announced their intention of doubling their software engineering headcount in India within the next year.
EV market leader Tesla also announced to establish large operations in India “as soon as humanly possible” according to CEO Elon Musk.
The Indian automotive software talent pool is growing more quickly than anywhere else in the world and setting the stage to surpass the United States in the next 10 years.
The companies that embrace this region will have a significant information advantage on next-generation automotive software trends compared to those that don’t.
Is your company ready?
