Exclusive interview with Gaurav Gupta of Mahindra Satyam, VP, Head Aerospace & Defence, Europe.

Mahindra Satyam is a leading information, communications and technology company providing a wide range of outsourcing services for a global market. The company is an expert in industry technology, functional practices and a global delivery models, ranking as one of the top 10 business houses based in India.

Gaurav Gupta is responsible for all aerospace and defence commerce within Europe, involved in collaborations and wider relationships including EADS, BAE systems and Saab , providing end-to-end engineering services and IT related services. Mahindra Satyam conducts contracts both offshore in India but also in Europe, with global centres in Hamburg and France.

What does Mahindra Satyam view as current strategic choices for destinations?

The growing relationship between France and India in the current climate, because of high defence spending, makes the country figure at the top of our list as a strategic destination to invest. Mahindra Satyam has over 1000 engineers working on Aerospace programs for global players in US and Europe, with around 200 engineers in France. With expansion into France, we expect in two or three years there will be significant demand in services based on various programs running within EADS including Airbus. From an operations standpoint this would involve creating local jobs and using talent locally which may not be available in India. This helps position ourselves slightly higher than purely providing services at a low cost. We are investing proactively in creating a local talent pool and infrastructure with a view of vision and investment.

What are the key topics and trends in Aerospace and Defence at the moment?

The Mahindra Group has made strategic investments in acquiring a couple of companies in Australia and an aerostructure components facility in India. Our relationships in Europe can be levelled to bring in technologies to other markets. Investing in the Indian defence markets would require a lot of technology and skill labour, this cannot be achieved without technology coming from the West.

With the coverage of private space shuttle flights in the UK press, what are your thoughts?

India has an established space programme, we support the programme from both an electric and a construction point of view. It is very interesting to see how the space programme can be made commercially viable in the future.