NEC seeing healthy margin mix here, says India head Aalok Kumar

Pune: Japanese firm NEC Corporation said its India business was growing in healthy double digits, as the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital solutions.

“We’re seeing a healthy margin mix in India, and that’s helping us become extremely optimistic and bullish about the Indian market,” said Aalok Kumar, president and CEO, NEC Corporation India.

The company currently has about 6,000 employees in the country and intends to grow this to 14,000 by 2023.


“We’ve grown our headcount by 20-25% over the pandemic and will be following a hybrid model of working going forward. This gives us tremendous flexibility to hire in tier II and III cities going forward,” said Kumar.

As part of the company’s global mid-term market plan, NEC is betting big on India to leverage the solution development and delivery capability from the country to drive global business growth, said Kumar.

“Our India focus is tailored to suit the pace at which the country’s aggressive digital transformation is shaping up,” he said.

The company’s strategy in India is centred on three pillars – leveraging NEC’s delivery capabilities, bringing about digital transformation in governance and driving growth through innovation.

One of its eight global R&D lab is in India, and it will be investing in strengthening the capabilities for this lab. NEC is also in the process of setting up Centres of Excellence for different capabilities to drive innovation out of India.

NEC has been present in India for close to seven decades and has been working closely on driving several of the digitisation initiatives including Aadhaar.

“Our model is accelerating India and powering global opportunities. We believe India is ripe with opportunities for digitisation. We are heavily invested in India, and we are building solutions and running projects out of India for global markets,” said Kumar.

Kumar said that once a project has been worked on, and implemented in India, the complexities, scale and challenges equip one to do any global project, and that is what the company is trying to do here.

The company also manages the entire import-export container tracking through NICDC logistics and is behind several of the smart city projects including ones in Thiruvananthapuram, Ahmedabad and Gurugram.