HYDERABAD: Industries minister KT Rama Rao, during the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos in Switzerland, called on Hitachi chairman Nakanishi San and his senior management team and explained about the proactive business environment in the state and discussed many possible areas of collaboration. India’s Kalyani group chairman Baba Kalyani was also present at meet.Rama Rao and his team of officials met business heads from various companies on the sidelines of the summit.
The delegation met Petra Laux, global head (public affairs policy) of Novartis and discussed expansion of the operations of Novartis in Hyderabad. Rama Rao talked about the overall plan for the Hyderabad Pharma City and the animal testing facility.Petra Laux said Novartis was very happy about the pharma city. She mentioned that their current footprint was about 90,000 sft of laboratory space employing about 350 scientific researchers and would be expanding to 1,62,000 sft to establish its high-potent formulation development laboratories along with analytical development facility which will facilitate 150 more scientific researchers. This expansion of Novartis R&D Centre will significantly boost the development of Genome Valley, she said.
In another meeting, Rama Rao met Anthony Fernandes, CEO, Air Asia Berhad and discussed the prospects of setting up Air Asia’s tech centre in Telangana and running innovation programmes to support start-ups in the aerospace sector. Rao also met a delegation of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries led by Ken Kawai, executive vice-president. In the meeting, he talked about the prospects for the foreign investors in TS and also highlighted the Telangana government’s industrial policy, TS-iPASS, a single-window clearance initiative for investors. He invited Mitsubishi heads to Telangana to study the opportunities available to foreign investors. He appealed to Kawai to set up a Japanese small and medium enterprises park in Telangana.