Capgemini opens a Mobility Lab in Gaia

Located in Vila Nova de Gaia, it is called Mobility Lab and is the most recent research and development (R&D) laboratory of the technological giant Capgemini. Dedicated to the strategy of sustainable and intelligent mobility, this new engineering centre starts with a team of over 350 professionals and expects to reach 700 new jobs by 2025.

Supplier of software solutions for international clients such as BMW, Volkswagen, Renault, Bosch, Continental or Panasonic Automotive, the French group advances with this new investment, that did not want to count, to “leverage Portugal’s position at the top of the sustainable mobility value chain and transform the country into a reference in safe autonomous driving and sustainable transport worldwide.”

Official source indicated to ECO that in this choice of the district of Porto (where it already had offices) to install this first mobility hub of Capgemini in Portugal, it also considered “the presence of several universities in the periphery – Aveiro, Braga, Porto – and the strong talent in the region”. “The investment in this area was natural”, he added. The company calculates that this business area for the automotive industry in Portugal generates an annual turnover of over 25 million euros and has a growth potential of 20% per year.

“The Mobility Lab emerges in this revolution that the automotive industry is experiencing since the beginning of this century with the explosion of mobile technologies, the growth of connectivity and the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as the emergence of smart cars. This new centre reinforces Capgemini Portugal’s commitment to develop the skills of its Portuguese team in the area of software for the automotive industry,” underlined Bruno Coelho, member of the executive committee and responsible for the company’s R&D sector.

At Rua de Serpa Pinto 44, right in front of the Douro River, the space inaugurated this Tuesday will test new solutions in an R&D environment, which can then be applied to concrete projects. Among these software applications for the automotive industry that are being developed are, for example, autonomous driving solutions, connectivity and connection to the cloud, or automatic verification and validation using artificial intelligence.

Bruno Coelho also stressed that this project “reinforces the work that [has] been developed in recent years to support automotive clients in their digital transformation through the creation of software for vehicles and cloud, accompanying the entire development cycle of the solutions, which begins by defining the requirements and architecture and extends to the validation processes of the systems.”

Besides the structure now reinforced in Porto, Capgemini has offices in Lisbon – where it has an area dedicated to Quantum technologies -, in Évora and in Fundão, where it operates the 5G Lab. Through the sub-brand Capgemini Engineering, the group founded 55 years ago, which invoiced 18 billion euros in 2021 and employs over 325 thousand people in 50 countries, has already opened the recruitment process in Portugal to capture another 200 highly qualified professionals to reinforce this team dedicated to the automotive sector.