Arthur D Little To Close Offices In Recast
Arthur D Little, (ADL), the global management consultancy firm, is restructuring its India operations.
It is closing down its two offices in India but plans to retain its presence in India and acquire more assignments.
The firm will fly in its people to work in client offices on a regular basis and will have no ground office, nor the administrative facilities in the country.
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Robin F Newell, managing director of Arthur D Little India Consu-ltancy said the firm was relocating all its consultants. We are not pulling out of India. We still remain committed and will continue to work and get more assignments, he explained.
The firm will be closing down its offices in Bangalore and Mumbai.
Of the seven consultants working in India, two are American expatriates and they will be flying back to US, while the Indian consultants will be relocated in ADL offices in the south-east Asian region.
We set up our offices in India two years back. During this period, we realised that it is not necessary to have a ground office to work in India. We operate in 60 countries worldwide and we dont have offices in all of them, explained Newell.
The nearest regional office of ADL in Singapore will look after Indian operations. In the last two years, ADL has bagged some major assignments including public sector refiner, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd, (BPCL).
Newell said there have been some additions to the list in the last three months, a pharma multinational, a telecom and a metals company. He refused to divulge their names.
ADL has 30 offices worldwide with 2,700 people and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
It offers consultancy in several industries ranging from automotive to utilities and travel and tourism. It has advised some premier companies like Shell Chemical, a $4 billion company of the Shell Oil group, the Argentine Nati-onal Oil Comp-any, Rhone-Po-ulenc \Rhodia of Brazil, S C Johnson & Company of USA, and Volvo of Sweden.
We offer global pool of talent in different areas and since Indian companies are looking for international expertise in their industries, we can easily satisfy that by moving people between countries.\
Unless there are exceptional cases of culture and language, we dont need physical presence in many countries, said Newell. India, he added, is culturally different from south-east Asian countries and Japan and China.
ADL has offices in Japan confined only to that country and in Hong Kong concentrating on both Hong Kong and China. To tackle our clients, we need local people and local offices in those countries, added Newell.
In India, the firm plans to focus more on core sector like oil and gas, telecom, commercialisation of state electricity boards and other infrastructure areas.