Samsung India will hire 2,500 graduates from the country’s top engineering institutes over the next three years in what is being billed as one of its largest recruitment drives to ramp up research and development talent.
According to Economic Times, Dipesh Shah, global senior vice president at Samsung said that a 1,000 engineering graduates will be absorbed this year in the company’s R&D centres in Bengaluru, Noida and Delhi. “A majority of these fresh hires will be for new-age domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and biometrics,” he added.
For Samsung, which has always invested heavily in R&D—its global spends in 2016 on the segment was about $13 billion—this year’s hiring will be a 25% jump over the last year’s 800-odd grads. Last year, Samsung was the top recruiter at the IITs.
The company’s Bengaluru R&D centre is the biggest outside South Korea, where research is being done on smart devices, semiconductors, printers, modems, Internet protocols and networks. Among the core areas being worked on are artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, IoT, augmented reality and networks including 5G in Bengaluru, and biometrics, mobile software development, multimedia and data security in Noida.
Although Shah said the aggressive hiring is not driven by competition, analysts said that Samsung is definitely feeling the heat, in light of the fact that as per the latest numbers from research firm IDC, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has caught up with it for the top spot in the Indian smartphone market.