There will be more captives in India to harness talent: Quess Corp Chairman

Quess Corp, which helps staff most global technology majors with people in India, expects global companies set up new captives in the country or expand their existing operations due to the proven expertise of the IT industry during the lockdown due to Covid-19 to shift to work from home without causing disruptions to businesses.

“One aspect of technology is that unlike manufacturing or outsourced production systems, you don’t have physical movement of freight. It goes through the large pipes that the telecom networks have built and it doesn’t get disrupted due to a lockdown,” Ajit Isaac, CEO of Quess Corp told ET.

He said companies in India have demonstrated that there is minimal disruption during the transition to work from home over the last two months, while ensuring that they supported operations of companies globally.

Quess employs over 3.85 lakh people, of which over 2.66 lakh are deployed with companies such as Amazon, Samsung and Vodafone. Quess also has a unit that delivers technology services for local as well as global clients.

“Captives have had a good run. I was speaking to the CEOs of a few captives, they are bullish on India. The ability of companies in India to ensure business continuity during the lockdown has reinforced this,” said Isaac

India has over 1,200 global inhouse centres or captives are called,of companies such as Intel, Google, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs and SAP, employing over a million people in these units. In 2019, 75 captives either set up operations or expanded their campuses in India.

Experts say the economic downturn caused by Covid-19 in developed markets and the focus on technology would mean that there will be more work outsourced to countries such as India.

This situation will push a lot more customers to look at outsourcing. It may not necessarily be offshoring, but they might want to do outsourcing to keep their costs variable… So, some sectors which were not looking at outsourcing, or some clients which were closed to outsourcing, will definitely be looking, at this point in time,” HCL Techologies CEO C Vijayakumar told ET last week.

A Bank of America (BoFA) research expects half of its sector analysts expect technology investments in their sectors to increase, with 44% expecting more robots & automation.

Covid-19 has seen an acceleration of structural shifts in how we use and deploy technology, leaving a legacy of advanced computing, data generation, new infrastructure and bandwidth. Commercialising “Moonshot” technologies such as autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, and vertical farming could also be accelerated. Work from home, ecommerce, and stay-at-home activities are nearer-term shifts, it said.

Isaac of Quess says that India will see rapid growth in sectors such as health care, banking and financial services, telecom, supply chaim and logistics.

“There will be a lot of pent up demand. These sectors will see growth,” he said.

―Technocodex