Bengaluru: Its raining good news for Kannadigas in general and Bengalureans specifically. After Shell set up a center in Bengaluru, its been reported today, that Exxon Mobil, one of the world’s biggest companies, is about to make a $400 million-$500 million (Rs 2,500-crore-Rs 3,150-crore) investment in Bengaluru to establish a technical and business support services centre. Bryan Milton, Exxon Mobil’s president of global services, is in Bengaluru for the formal launch of the centre. An additional multi-million investment is being considered to establish a technology and R&D centre in India.
Karnataka IT secretary Srivatsa Krishna confirmed the company is investing in Bengaluru, but declined to comment further. The company is said to have chosen Bengaluru as the location after also considering Delhi/NCR, Chennai and Hyderabad.
The oil & gas major, with a turnover of $412 billion last year, is the second biggest US company by revenue, after Walmart. It’s variously estimated to be the fifth or sixth biggest company in the world, but oil prices have crashed and there is enormous pressure to cut costs.
The Bengaluru centre will initially have about 1,000 employees, but it is expected to grow to 5,000-6,000 employees when the centre is fully operational.
A company spokesman confirmed that the company is “establishing a new affiliate to develop a business support centre in Bengaluru later this year to provide a range of technical and business support services for the company globally which is expected to begin in late 2015”.
“Exxon Mobil designed its global business support centre network to improve efficiency and effectiveness by centralizing and integrating business processes. The network provides services to operations in 120 countries around the world. A multi-million-dollar investment, the business support centre in Bengaluru will be similar in size to others in the Exxon Mobil global network and is expected to provide more than 1,000 positions,” the spokesperson said.
Rival, Netherlands-based Royal Dutch Shell established an R&D centre in Bengaluru in 2006 that currently has an estimated 1,500 researchers and engineers. It is in the process of establishing a custom-built 40-acre campus that is expected to become operational this year. The centre is one of only three such in the world. The others are in Amsterdam in Netherlands and Houston in the US. The Bengaluru centre could be today Shell’s biggest. It’s the lead centre for bitumen research, creating different kinds of asphalt applications for roads. It is a major centre of computational science, which involves gathering massive amounts of data generated to construct mathematical and software models to analyze and solve problems.
