Ford Business Solutions, the global hub of technology and business services within the Ford family, has launched an office in Bengaluru. With a Global Capability Center (GCC) in Chennai and around 12,000 employees across India, FBS aims to recruit 2,000 additional employees over the next four years, beginning in 2025.
Mike Amend, Chief Enterprise Technology Officer of Ford, shared, “We have been in India for over 25 years, starting mainly with the accounting team and growing into tech. Slowly, we evolved into other divisions. Employees here serve the company globally in all functions. We do technology work like product development, manufacturing engineering, supply chain, and testing out of here, among other traditional functions like finance, HR, and marketing.”
He added the team in India is not localized to the Asia region, meaning they support facets of the business globally across other geographies like North America, and Europe.
The Bengaluru office, an extension of the Chennai GCC, has a seating capacity of around 350 employees. Currently, the office has about 75 people working there.
“We predominantly opened the new office for high-tech, niche, and high-demand skills. We’re building more platforms that can support various digital capabilities – stuff around cybersecurity, DevSecOps, DevOps, and AI, all of which are in high demand.”
He continued, “While we have a big presence in Chennai, Bangalore has more companies with experience in areas like digital and AI than in Chennai and so, we want another point of presence here. We intend to use the Bangalore office to hire hard niche talent that we probably won’t capture as much as we want in Chennai.”
FBS hired about 1,050 people last year in Chennai, primarily for enterprise tech. Of the 12,000, about 40 per cent is tech-related talent, while the other 30 per cent looks after product development and engineering, including manufacturing engineering. Half of the global enterprise tech team sits out of Chennai, the CTO highlighted.