- Friday, April 25, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Defence companies from Britain are eyeing to boost tie-ups or making new investments in India amid bigger efforts to diversify their supply chains, Reuters reported citing an industry body on Thursday (6).
The report said Britain has sought to deepen with India economic, defence and security ties, committing to establish closer links with the Indo-Pacific region, while casting China as an “epoch-defining challenge” to the global order.
“We have got a group of 22 British defence companies, with collective revenues of about $60 billion, really focused on doing business with and in India,” UK-India Business Council (UKIBC) chief executive Richard McCallum was quoted as saying by Reuters.
He added about 11 have already set up joint ventures or subsidiaries in the South Asian nation, and all of them are looking to do more.
Among the companies that have a presence in India’s aerospace and defence sector, BAE Systems has an Indian unit, while MBDA has a venture with Larsen & Toubro, the report said, adding Rolls-Royce is planning to collaborate on jet-engine technology.
While McCullum did not say which firms from Britain will make new investments or which Indian firms they might be in talks with, he said in an interview that it is important to embed India into the supply chain, the Reuters report added.
India and Britain are also in the process of negotiating a free trade deal that could bolster their annual bilateral trade by billions of dollars.
UKIBC chair Richard Heald told the news outlet that sustainable energy and green finance were among other areas of collaboration.
However, there are also challenges like those on enforcement of contract and past decisions on retrospective taxes that led to long legal disputes between the Indian government and firms such as Vodafone that hurt India’s image as an investment destination.
Heald said the UKIBC hopes to see more clarity on protection of investments to further boost confidence.
He said India’s disputes with British firms, resolved over many years, had “cast a long shadow on the operating environment”, adding that huge strides have been made since, the report added.
