Plexion Tech's expansion approved

Plexion Technologies, an engineering design services firm, will expand its business with an investment of around Rs 9 crore ($2 million), hiring over 150 staff.

The 100 per cent EOU's expansion is among the latest set of projects cleared by the state government, according to a release by the industry department, here on Monday.

The niche design house was started by former ISRO, HAL and NAL scientists, in 2000. They raised some $9 million from J P Morgan Partner, a venture fund and went on to do advanced design work for customer such as German automaker DaimlerChrysler and Swedish firm Volvo.

Plexion's portfolio at the time included computer-aided design and analysis, enterprise and product data management and product lifecycle management services for customers in the auto, aerospace and general engineering industry.

It had set up sales offices in Detroit and Seattle in the US, London, UK, Frankfurt, Germany, Toulouse in France, a major aeronautics hub, and Singapore.

M K Padmanabhan, Plexion's founder president had said in 2001, there was an untapped business opportunity in engineering services. That year, Plexion opened its software development centre here.

For the year to March 2004, Plexion had some 200 staff and revenues of just under $4 million. The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), estimates IT-enabled engineering design services exported from India could be up to $500 million today.

The outsourced market worldwide for such work, however, was between $7 billion and $15 billion, Nasscom says.