Boeing Co. and Airbus SE are increasingly looking to India for highly-skilled, low-cost engineers to meet a boom in demand for aircraft and expand their manufacturing presence in the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Airbus plans to hire 1,000 people in India this year out of 13,000 globally. Boeing and its suppliers, which already employ about 18,000 workers in the nation, have been growing by some 1,500 staff every year, the U.S. jet manufacturer’s India head Salil Gupte told Bloomberg News in an interview.

With about 1.5 million engineering students graduating annually, India is a rich source of talent for planemakers facing record orders from airlines as travel surges again after the Covid pandemic. Boeing can hire an engineer in Bengaluru, India’s southern tech hub, for 7% of the cost of a similar role in Seattle, according to salary data compiler Glassdoor.

The country has Boeing’s second-biggest workforce worldwide, Gupte said.

“Companies come to India for the incredible talent in innovation, not just in technology and software, but also in hard engineering and increasingly in manufacturing,” he said at the Aero India show in Bengaluru last month.

Alongside the hiring push, Boeing and Airbus are also establishing some production in India, which is pitching itself as a less politically fraught alternative to China.

Boeing signed a partnership with GMR Aero Technic Ltd. on March 10 to convert passenger jets to freighters in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, where it already has a facility making vertical fins, which stabilize planes. The plant, employing over 900 engineers and technicians, also produces Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopter structures, including fuselages for customers worldwide.

Airbus has also been touting India’s manufacturing prospects as it hires in the country. In October, Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended a ceremony in his home state of Gujarat to mark the start of construction of a facility where Airbus Defence & Space SA and a unit of local conglomerate Tata Group will make C-295 transport aircraft for the Indian military.

The nation is an emerging market for sales, with the revitalized Air India Ltd. making a blockbuster order for 470 aircraft last month, split between the planemakers.

“The time is right for India to turn into an international hub,” Airbus Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Faury said at the time of the aircraft order. “India is well on its way.”

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