Rolls-Royce ties up with TCS to drive growth in India operations

Jet engine maker RollsRoyce Holdings Plc is looking at driving growth in its India operations through a partnership with Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), the UKbased company said.

The partnership with TCS will accelerate its digital transformation and innovation strategy. It will provide RollsRoyce with digital platform capabilities that will allow it to capture, share and analyse data more easily across the engine maker. That, in turn, will give the company room to develop new products and services at a faster pace, Rolls-Royce said in a statement.

"We look at this as the largest strategic move we have made in India in a long time. This will build the company's next generation innovations from India," Kishore Jayaraman, president of India and South Asia at Rolls-Royce said in an interview.

Both companies have been working together on engineering services since 2010 and this is an extension of that relationship, Rolls-Royce said in a statement. Going ahead, using TCS's platforms and growth innovation models as a foundation, RollsRoyce's digital transformation journey in Bengaluru will evolve into a separate digital hub.

Rolls-Royce is also planning to expand its India operations, strategic marketing director Ben Story said in an interview. "We have got some further plans. We're very confident that there's more to come," he said, without revealing additional details.

India is one of the company's five global hubs across the world-the others being in the US, UK, Singapore and China. It is one of the key markets for Rolls-Royce both in terms of skills and capability and business opportunity, the two executives said. The goal is to get to a point where Rolls-Royce can manufacture its engines in India.

But the company has not yet got any concrete plans to set up an engine-making facility, according to Jayaraman. "The entry barrier is very high to set up such a facility. What's very important is that the products we sell have to be serviced locally so customers have access to us very quickly.