NEW DELHI, 8 December 2005 — Microsoft Chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates plans to scale up its India operations over the next four years by nearly doubling its work force. “We depend on India for manpower that is why we are scaling operations here. We have 4,000 people today and we will be 7,000 over the next three to four years. We are hiring as fast as we can,” Gates said while addressing a news conference here. The percentage increase in employees would be the highest in India, he said.
“They will play a key part in product development, research and support services,” Gates said.
The new hiring is part of a “conservative estimate” of $1.7 billion (1.45 billion euro) the company will spend in India, Gates told a press conference.
“This amount will be deployed across select focus areas over the next four years, in line with Microsoft’s strategic vision for India,” Gates said.
He said the money will be spent on bringing computer services to hundreds of millions of poor rural people in India as well as increasing its marketing and research work in the country.
The world’s leading software maker outsources many services to India where wage costs are far below those in the West.
Underlining the importance of India in Microsoft’s future plans, Gates said his company had opened a research centre in Bangalore this year with the aim of taking computers into rural India.
The Bangalore research center is Microsoft’s fourth in the world — the others are located in the United States, Europe and China. “As we created the fourth here in India, we said the theme of that would be low-cost computing,” he said. “We said then there will be low-cost computers and this will lead the way to make breakthroughs.”