Fulfilling My Delta Production Mission in Incredible India

By Bobby Lai, Delta India

India is a very unfamiliar country for a Taiwanese professional. I never expected to have a chance to visit, much less live and work here. But in fact, I’ve been working at Delta India for more than two years up until now. Let me share with you how I ended up in the amazing land, my success factors and my mission to make Delta India production a pillar of Delta Group.

Back in December 2017, I was at a quality diagnosis meeting at Delta China’s Wujiang factory. There Mr. James Ng and Mr. Dick Hsieh met me and invited me to transfer to Delta India to become the operations head at a new factory starting construction the following year.

So on December 1, 2018, I took a flight from Taiwan and arrived at Bangalore airport. It was my first time to work as an expatriate at Delta India. The sense I got when I first saw India was almost the same as when I went to China for my first business trip back in 1995. The biggest difference is India had more cars on the road.

The first surprise to me was the weather in Bangalore, I thought India is a very hot country like Thailand but the temperature here is very comfortable for living. The initial challenges for me were food and communication, but my adaption to these would improve gradually. It is not difficult to find Chinese food in India and also to get delicious western food. What surprised me is that you can get all kinds of homemade beers at restaurants in India. This is a real pleasure if you like beer.

How to enjoy living in India is a good topic to cover as a foreigner. Learning the culture of your host country is the most important thing for a foreigner to do. Especially since I need to lead the local team. Most of our thinking or judgment is based on previous experience and what we learned in the past but the behavior of Indians, the local regulations and laws are the most critical aspects for me to consider when I make decisions.

I got lots of support from my team and step-by-step I learned know how to align the local rules to make the right judgement. This would prove to be the key success factor for me and my work with our Delta India team.

“Incredible India” is the best description for this vast country. Buddhism was brought from India to China, then to Taiwan and so I can see lots of gods who are the same as those I saw in Taiwan. To be modest is a big part of Buddhist philosophy. I am very interested to visit temples here as it helps me to understand the history of Buddhism more deeply.

In 2015, our Delta management team made a united decision to sign an MoU with the Government of India cementing Delta’s commitment to invest in India. This included a new headquarters/R&D lab in Bangalore and new manufacturing factories in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu. India is regarded as the 2nd China in terms of economic growth in the near future and this should be the main reason for Delta’s investment.

The aim of the new Krishnagiri factory will be to first invest 40B INR and provide 20,000 job opportunities. Our production output will be ramped up subsequently and by 2028, Delta India’s new factory will become the 3rd largest production site for Delta. Making this production ambitious plan a reality is my mission during my assignment in India. The trade war between the US and China gave Delta the motivation to speed up the emergence of our Delta India factory. We should be able to achieve our targets in 2024 and 2028.

I am glad to have the chance to work in the top two largest countries of the world– China and India in my Delta career. It is largely thanks to the local teams who support me to push forward the new factory setup that we can achieve so much. Let’s continue working closely and keep having the strong confidence we need to create the highest capability of operations in our Delta India team.

About the Author (Guest Contributor)

Bobby Lai

I joined Delta in 2000 as a quality manager of PSBG in Taiwan and soon transferred to Delta China to be a plant manager. In 2010, I returned to Taiwan as a project manager at the corporate quality headquarters. In 2012, I became regional quality director in China before returning to my plant manager role. Since 2018, I’ve been with DIN as the operation head for preparing our new factory.

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