Business Delegation From The ICT Sector Of East Germany Held Road Shows In India

A business delegation from Eastern Germany led by Germany Trade And Invest (GTAI), held road shows in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi during a week long tour to India to attract potential investors from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector.

Addressing an event held in the Capital yesterday, the German Ambassador Martin Ney underlining the potential of investments by Indian firms in European Union said, “German companies alone have invested a total of 9.7 billion Euros in India since 2000. If we compare this number to Indian investments in Germany, one conclusion becomes quite clear, there is still some potential the other way around”.

“Eastern Germany has become a tech hub for young, innovative start-ups working on the edge of technological knowledge,” said Jürgen Friedrich , CEO of federal economic agency Germany Trade & Invest (GTAI). “Saxony in particular is developing a reputation as a good value High-tech location for the ICT industry, with well-qualified personnel thick on the ground and excellent infrastructure.

With a forecast market value of around EUR 135 billion in 2017, the German ICT market is the second largest in Europe. IT& business services account for 30 percent of turnover, with the software sector generating a further 17 percent of revenue. Of the 1,333 investment projects within the ICT industry in Germany between 2010 and 2016, 285 were in the new eastern states, where clusters like Silicon Saxony in Dresden, a high-tech cluster with 320 member companies, offer excellent opportunities.

Communication technology is acting as a backbone for the digitization process in India, a country which itself added over 1,000 tech start-ups in 2017. Many of these focused on business to business tech, such as healthtech, fintech, e-commerce and aggregators, as well as AI, analytics and augmented reality, all fields in which Germany has, to some extent, a pioneering role. Government initiatives and the involvement of research and development, academia, start-ups and enterprises are driving an innovation boom in areas such as cloud, wireless and wired broadband, while data acquisition technologies and analytics are set to transform the country by providing advanced intelligence in a country which already has one of the world’s largest software industries.

The industry has reached a transitional phase in India now, where new skills and newer, deeper technologies are required to make further significant progress. These are all to be found in Eastern Germany, which is what the delegation explained.

“Also, there are a lot of German companies well established in manufacturing but they have huge difficulty to adapt to the digital agenda. There is a good fit between established manufacturers in Germany, many of them SMEs, and ICT companies in India”, added Friedrich.

Over 150 Indian companies participated in the road shows to identify mutual needs and possible synergies with German industry clusters.