India to add 500 GCCs, taking the tally to 2000 by 2026

BENGALURU: Over 500 global capability centres (GCCs) are expected to be added to India’s existing tally of 1,500 GCCs by 2026, IT industry body Nasscom said.

GCCs are the tech and shared services centres of MNCs in India, and these are growing rapidly as global companies look for talent to help them digitally transform. The 1,500 GCCs in India employ 1.3 million people. GCC revenue can potentially scale up to $60-$85 billion by 2026, from $33.8 billion in 2019-20, according to the report. The $33.8 billion revenue is about 1% of India’s GDP. GCC revenue was $19.4 billion in 2015, indicating a revenue CAGR of 11% between then and the 2020 fiscal.

“We are in the third generation of GCCs in India. The first was about productivity, then about building enterprise capabilities, and the third piece now is on transformation work focused on the middle and front office,” said K S Viswanathan, VP of industry initiatives at Nasscom.

Among those who established GCCs recently is Italian auto component major Marelli, which has set up a technical R&D centre in Bengaluru that plans to employ 600 people in two years. The centre will focus on electronics, automotive lighting, and both internal combustion powertrain and electric powertrain.

Rakuten India, the global product and innovation centre for the Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten Group, plans to hire over 1,000 people over the next 12-18 months, which will take its overall workforce to over 3,000. Rakuten’s Bengaluru operations, the second largest outside Japan, is accelerating the company’s capabilities for deep-tech innovation and R&D in areas such as e-commerce, fintech, content and entertainment, as well as AI in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing. Fabless semiconductor manufacturer Silicon Laboratories has launched an R&D centre in Hyderabad.

GE Healthcare has launched its first Made-in-India AI-powered cath lab to advance cardiac care in India. Its AutoRight tech automatically optimises image and dose parameters in real time, enabling clinicians to focus their attention and expertise on patients.

Deutsche Bank uses a low-code/ no-code platform to eliminate manual work and delays in processing transfer pricing invoices. In workflows, the bank has reduced 93% of manual tasks. It has used the low-code/ no-code platform to read 70,000 emails in 10-15 seconds. Deutsche Bank’s technology unit in India has about 5,000 employees across Pune and Bengaluru, focused on the bank’s digital transformation.

Many heads of GCC centres believe India is an imperative and not just a labour arbitrage game. Gunjan Samtani, head of Goldman Sachs Services in India, said at the recently held Bengaluru Tech Summit that the India centre is less about the cost advantage and the number of people. “I think we sometimes get the basic taxonomy wrong. There are many companies and individuals who will still call their offices captive sites. There is nothing more colonial in its inheritance than calling it captive centres. What is back office? It’s so much about the expression of what the collective is delivering enabled by the ecosystem of our country,” he said. Goldman Sachs’ India centre represents the second largest site for the firm outside of New York, employing over 9,000 people. Times of India