NEC – Powering Billion Dreams by Changing the Tech Landscape in India

Headquartered in Japan, with 123 years of experience of nurturing world class technologies and developing the capabilities to implement them, NEC has been working as a silent crusader in India for over 7 decades, significantly shaping its digital transformation journey.  

As India’s longest-standing tech partner, NEC has many remarkable firsts to its credits within the country. The global giant was the first to set up a 2 Ghz microwave communication system at the National Physics Laboratory in 1956, the first to set up an analogue switch for the Department of Telecom in 1964, the first to set up a satellite earth station for VSNL and ONGC and the first to introduce the Fax system in the country, to name a few. More recently, it has also been involved in the implementation of the Aadhaar biometric system, which was the most complex and widely distributed multi-modal biometric system on the planet.  

In a riveting conversation on a special show, ‘NEC – Powering Billion Dreams’, in association with News18, Aalok Kumar, President & CEO, NEC Corporation India shares the company’s larger vision, its plans for India and how it is fueling the digital transformation of the country.  

“We are proud of the marquee mega-projects we have executed in India over the past 7 decades,” says Aalok Kumar. “Now we are moving away from being just for enterprises and involved only in monolithical architecture, to connecting people and crafting technology that could be in everyone’s pocket.”

Considering itself as a partner to its customers, in the public and private sector, the company takes up projects end-to-end, from thought-leadership and execution to maintenance. “Our core value proposition, unlike many of our peers, is to not just to provide products and solutions but technology infrastructure, implementation capabilities and maintenance capabilities,” explains Aalok Kumar. “NEC’s primary projects have been in three areas – laying of structural digital infrastructure and foundations, then deploying technologies to improve productivity and last mile connectivity and finally, instituting technology to leverage data, like AI and ML, a space in which India is fertile with opportunity.”

In the context of these three pillars, the company has undertaken smart city projects in centers like Gurugram, Trivandrum, Saharanpur, Meerut, Hubli and Pune, to name a few. In the transportation sector, it has automated Bus Rapid Transportation Systems in Ahmedabad and Hubli. It has recently completed a project for Airport Authority of India, which enabled completely touchless boarding, using facial recognition in place of boarding passes. At a logistical level, every container that comes in and goes out of the country is tracked on an NEC platform, enabling 100% visibility and offering a leading indicator for the economy. Where communications are concerned, it has connected India to neighboring countries, and its far-flung union territories of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, through sub-sea cable.    

But the company’s interest in India goes beyond. “When I look at the opportunity that India’s talent presents, it is enormous. I am on a mission to not just position ‘India for India’ but ‘From India for Global’,” he shared. “We have a huge 5G lab in Chennai, the only one of its kind in the world, where we are doing inter-operability testing, even for our European customers. The first 5G O-RAN implementation for a private player in Japan, was done out of India and we are undertaking multiple projects in the Middle East, Europe, etc., sitting out of India. For us, India as an opportunity and India’s talent has a potential that we can take overseas. That’s the reason why Japan and NEC, Japan, are so focused on India and I’m really excited that our time has come.”

To leverage the opportunity, NEC has created a global Center of Excellence (CoE) for building AI platforms in India that will serve projects across the world. It is also creating a CoE for the transport sector globally and to take its logistics technology of track and trace at scale to other markets overseas, it is setting up a CoE. As the world’s largest and most advanced facial recognition biometric company, NEC is creating a CoE in India that can add its facial recognition engine as a layer on multiple applications in different industries.

“Essentially, we are aiming to create technology that is industry agnostic. Wherever there is scale, and multiple stakeholders, our technology can become a bridge to bring everything together and that’s the power India needs today,” says Aalok Kumar.

“NEC sees India as a chosen investment destination because there are very few countries on the planet which are so fertile with the opportunity to make a difference. These opportunities to make a difference to society go hand-in-hand with what NEC has been doing for the past 123 years – improving the lives of people and solving complex societal problems. We are proud of our journey in India so far and are deeply entrenched in the Indian ecosystem. We are also confident of the long runway ahead of us,” he concludes.

This is a Partnered Post.