We established an office in Mumbai, India around five years ago. In that time we have developed a diverse port-folio of work across the country. This includes extensive design and delivery of Retail work (our company heritage) for some major Indian and International brands. We have also worked on a lot of new-build development projects to provide Offices, Hotels, Mixed-use, Retail/ Leisure centres and Residential buildings. A lot of this work has included concept design work from our UK offices, especially London.

Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, is the commercial and entertainment capital of India. It is also the world’s top 10 centres of commerce in terms of global financial flow, Mumbai accounts for slightly more than 6% of India’s economy contributing 10% of factory employment, 40% of income tax collections, 60% of customs duty collections, 20% of central excise tax collections, 40% of foreign trade and rupees 40,000 crore (US $10 billion) in corporate taxes to the Indian economy. Headquarters of a number of Indian financial institutions such as the Bombay Stock Exchange, Reserve Bank of India, National Stock Exchange, the Mint, as well as numerous Indian companies such as the Tata Group, Essel Group and Reliance Industries are located in Mumbai.

We are keen to explore opportunities to expand upon our UK connections with India. We recognise that a lot of UK/ EU companies are now either working in India already or considering entering it’s attractive emerging economy. If you are looking at development/ retail expansion opportunities in the region; we are keen to talk to you – either in the UK or India. Tim Hall (our London office MD) maintains very close links with our India team and our Mumbai team is led by Brijesh Kanabar.

Theo Pywowarczuk and I are heading over to our Mumbai office for a week shortly to assess our operations on the ground and to explore further opportunities to grow our contacts/ work out there. We are also exploring a number of potential opportunities which may also see us widen our regional coverage beyond India.

From numerous recent discussions on India, we understand that a number of UK Further and Higher Education Institutes are expanding into this region. Given our growing port-folio of UK University clients, we again see this as an opportunity to work with UK based clients in India.

I will be sharing more information about our projects in India in the coming weeks and also posting some blogs on our travels – so watch this space for more. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you are actively working in India and believe there could be tangible benefit in us talking in more detail.