... But tech R&D could face the heat of his policies, say experts
NEWDELHI: Large technology and internet companies, including Facebook and Google, who have set up research and development (R&D) centres in India, could face problems with Trump winning the US presidential elections, analysts said.
To make themselves more relevant for the next billion people joining the web, these firms have done some breakthrough innovations in the areas of offline internet, optimised applications, artificial intelligence and regional languages.
Trump wants innovations and jobs to remain within America, and to be done by Americans. He has blamed companies for shifting jobs out of the country, and said he will work against that when he becomes the President.
“IBM laid off 500 workers in Minneapolis and moved their jobs to India and other countries. A Trump administration will stop the jobs from leaving America, and we will stop the jobs from leaving Minnesota,” Trump had said during his campaign at Minneapolis.
In another instance, he had said: “They cannot come into the country. They go to Harvard, they are first in their class and they’re from India… they go back to India and they setup companies and they make a fortune and they employ lots of people and all of that.”
Gartner’s Arup Roy said Trump becoming the President will “add to the industry’s woes” since he is said to have “protectionist views”.
“There may be a bit of change in levels of R&D in India... You might not do end-to-end innovation like you did before, and they might keep some core things to themselves,” said Faisal Kawoosa, principal analyst at Cybermedia Research.
However, no economy can live in isolation, and America will have to “partner and collaborate” to advance, he added.
According to experts, India has the advantage in terms of the number of engineers and low-cost of labour. “Trump will have to build an entire talent pool to get the jobs back into America... It will impact companies if he comes out with any drastic measure,” said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Research.