A new R&D centre in Hyderabad and ZF, the world’s third-largest automotive-parts supplier, solutions for the India market will play a pivotal role in the development of the autonomous-vehicle technology , the global CEO of ZF, tells. Edited excerpts:The Indian market is changing in two different ways for ZF —the overall market growth, and the quality of products and our production plans. We see India as a production hub for our worldwide business for the future: Besides, we are expanding our local business. We are heavily investing in production and technology. Our next goal is to bring expertise in India like the software expertise in the India tech centre. Starting with 2014, we saw the stabilisation of the Indian economy. There are ambitious targets on stepping up from Euro IV to Euro VI. These are all growth contributors, and motivate companies like ours to invest more, as we have the right products — sophisticated transmission, airbag systems, and belts – for these initiatives.Today, we have the solely-owned company ZF and 6 other joint venture ( JV ) companies. Among them, we do about €1billion of business. We have given a target that in the whole Asia Pacific, we will expand more proportionally than our global growth — not only by revenue and sales alone, but also by added regional responsibilities and skillsets such as engineering, and procurement. It depends very much on JVs, but we should look at doubling our business in the next 7-8 years.In the past, we didn’t export enough, but we changed our philosophy last year to be more flexible to import. We have now reorganised our purchase organisation, and we are much more open to source from India and we want to develop this further. Today, we source about €35-40 million from ZF side, while TRW has been doing about €100 million. We want to take cumulative sourcing to €200 million.It has to be the pillar of software development to support the autonomous vehicle world. We could not realise our target before, but now with the tech centre, we see it playing a big role in technologies related to autonomous driving. We plan to have 2,500 engineers in 2-3 years at this centre.