NASDAQ-listed Zebra Tech currently has six R&D centres across the APAC region, including two in India, one in Singapore, Guangzhou, Colombo and Taipei each. While the ones in India focus more on software, the rest deal with hardware.
Ryan Goh, the company’s Senior VP and GM, APAC, said that this strategy has worked well for the company, owing to the availability of software engineers in the country.
“I think clearly we have lots of talents in software engineers in Bangalore and it has worked out very well for us and we are continuing to invest because we are moving more and more software capability into India,” Goh told ET Online at an event in Indonesia.
It currently has two centres in India, based out of Bengaluru and Pune. However, owing to the availability of engineering talent, it now intends to further augment the software side of its business in India with the expansion of its Bengaluru centre.
“We are in the midst of expanding our Bengaluru R&D centre. Upon its completion in the second half of 2023, this is set to be Zebra’s largest in APAC. It will span approximately 1,50,000 square feet and can house about 1,500 employees,” Rajnish Gupta, VP & Head, India and Sub-Continent business, Zebra Technologies APAC told ET Online.
Post expansion, the plant will focus on the R&D of Zebra’s device software portfolio and antuit.ai demand forecasting, inventory planning and price optimisation solutions.
“The new R&D centre in Bengaluru will complement our Pune-based R&D centre that focuses on Reflexis workforce management and task management solutions,” Gupta added.
According to Gupta, Zebra Tech typically invests around 10% of its annual global revenue (US$570M in 2022) in R&D.
Aimed at enhancing workflow automation, Zebra Tech is involved in producing equipment like RFID, barcode and QR code scanners that can scan barcodes at a rapid pace across diverse environments.
The company’s solutions range from manufacturing, transport, logistics, retail and healthcare industries. It currently has around 6,000 patents.
(The author was present at Zebra Technologies’ conference in Bali, Indonesia on its invitation.)
