Nearly 40 years after Texas Instruments, India’s poster child in the GCC, made Bengaluru its headquarters for R&D operations, Indian GCCs have created a compelling story for global companies to recognise India’s enviable pool of tech talent. This has: a) created more tech talent jobs in India; and b) solidified India’s position as a centre of advanced technological development.
6 lakh new jobs in half a decade
Consider these numbers: India is currently home to around 1,600 Global Capacity Centres (GCCs), and this number is expected to rise to 1,900 next year. A Nasscom-KPMG report highlights that the GCC market size has reached $60 billion, up from $19.6 billion in 2014-15 and will more than double to $46 billion by 2022-23, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.4%. Between 2018-19 and 2023-24, GCCs created over 600,000 new jobs, taking the total to over 1.6 million.
The sector’s prospects look even brighter. According to the latest Economic Survey, GCC countries are projected to generate $121 billion in revenue by 2030, roughly 3.5% of India’s current GDP, of which $102 billion will come from exports.
Take JPMorgan Chase for example. Its headcount in India has grown from 34,000 in 2018 to over 55,000. Deepak Mangla, CEO of corporate centers in India and the Philippines JPMorgan ChaseIn a recent interaction with TOI, he said that their operations in India are a microcosm of all business lines and functions, not just technology“We consider ourselves a technology-driven bank. I think we have a very good strategy for talent spread across the globe. We have over 60,000 technologists in the company and about a third of them are in India. Our corporate centres in India specifically employ 55,000 people, of which there are about 20,000 people in technology.”
Gunjan Samtani, Goldman Sachs’ global chief engineering officer and country head of Goldman Sachs Services India, said that more than 120 global functions across business and engineering are run from its India Gulf Cooperation centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, which employ 8,500 people. “Over the last two decades, the functions performed from India have evolved from end-of-day support for trading platforms and exchange connectivity to algorithmic trading platform support, data analytics and client reporting. Today, the India Gulf Cooperation centre is a centre of excellence with thought leadership for several equity engineering functions,” she said.
Innovation centers
India’s GCCs have emerged as a role model for innovation hubs. Texas Instruments (TI) India, for instance, is one of the first players to have enabled end-to-end chip design in the country. “TI engineers play an important role in the entire chip design process, from concept to design, product engineering, testing and validation, and system software… Some of the best product development teams in the industry exist here at TI India,” said Santhosh Kumar, President and Managing Director of TI.
Goldman Sachs’ India hub has developed Atlas, a low-latency trading platform that hosts a full suite of trading strategies to help clients achieve their trading objectives, perform historical analysis, build quantitative models with real-time market insights, and execute trades. “This platform helped shave microseconds off trade execution for our clients (low-latency trading). The reduction in latency on this platform helped us engage with existing and new hedge funds and quantitative clients,” Samtani said.
Recently, GE Aerospace CEO Larry Culp told TOI that the company’s 1,200 engineers at the John F Welch Technology Centre in Bengaluru are involved in cutting-edge work on the future of aviation, including the Leap engine for narrow-body aircraft, the GEnx in the wide-body space and the next-generation Rise platform for the narrow-body market. The company also announced an investment of over Rs 240 crore to expand and modernise its manufacturing facility in Pune. The factory already produces components that are supplied to GE’s global factories, where they are used to assemble engines such as the G90, GEnx, GE9X — the world’s most powerful commercial aircraft engine — and Leap engines from CFM, a joint venture of GE and Safran.
Moving up the value chain
Sangeeta Gupta, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Nasscom, said India will continue to be central to the growth of GCC countries, and will have a significant impact across economic, human capital, innovation, social and environmental dimensions. “Talent will be a key driver of this growth, with both new and established centres expanding their capabilities. There is a noticeable shift towards adding corporate functions, analytics and AI, with workloads increasingly focused on corporate functions, product management, decision support and embedded systems capabilities.”
Gupta added: “GCCs are becoming increasingly important to their parent companies, focusing on moving up the value chain, creating opportunities for future leadership and improving their overall impact.”
Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, Partner at tech growth advisory firm Catalincs, said, “With several hundred GCCs gaining critical size, I expect their employment numbers to accelerate from here on. I wouldn’t be surprised if the GCC headcount crosses 4 million in India in the next five years. The other big impact that GCCs today are making is technology transfer through R&D and know-how in newer areas like product development and management, AI, cyber engineering, edge computing, synthetic biology, etc. The fact that ISBs, IIMs and IITs today offer advanced programmes in product management is a case in point.”
As the boundaries between tech and traditional industries blur, Gulf countries are emerging as talent hotbeds in newer areas such as end-to-end development, artificial intelligence, IoT, embedded systems and automation, which is transforming global markets. “Established Gulf countries are fostering advanced skills that go beyond pure technology, including product management and architecture, where they are gaining deep domain expertise. This shift is enabling them to deliver higher-value work and gain a more comprehensive understanding of business contexts,” said Pari Natarajan, CEO of global management consultancy Zinnov. Her research showed that the number of global roles in Gulf countries in India is projected to grow from just 115 in 2015 to 30,000 by 2030.
Better paychecks
Lalit Ahuja, founder of Bengaluru- and US-based ANSR, which has set up over 120 GCCs, said GCCs have emerged as good payers, outshining their IT services peers in several roles in companies. Around 100 Indian GCCs have senior leaders who earn nearly $1 million in annual compensation, which includes cash and equity awards, Ahuja added. These roles include India-based site leaders and senior vice presidents who lead technology functions.
Arindam Sen, partner at EY India Global Business Services & Operations, said that CIO, CTO, CFO and CPO roles will increasingly be located outside India. “People from these centres are growing within the organisation and taking up these roles. Either the role itself stays here or people selected from these centres as part of their talent strategy end up taking up those roles.”
(With TOI tickets)
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