Concentrix to expand India operations by hiring 20,000 this year: CEO

Nasdaq-listed business process management company (BPM) Concentrix Corporation has experienced substantial growth in India over the past decade, with employee numbers slated to surpass 100,000 this year from 80,000 at present. It reported revenue of $7.1 billion in 2023, of which India contributed $898 million. The company sees India as a key market for both talent and market opportunities and expects its revenue from the region to cross $1 billion by the end of this year. CHRIS CALDWELL, president and chief executive officer of Concentrix, discusses the company’s hiring plans and growth strategy in an exclusive video interview with Ayushman Baruah. Edited excerpts:

What are your growth plans for the India market?
 

We have been in India for a little over a decade, and we have grown from less than a thousand people when we first started to about 80,000 people.

We plan to hire about 20,000 people by the end of this year, surpassing the 100,000 mark.

There is a significant uptick in the hiring of net new incremental jobs. It’s not backfilling attrition. We have a fairly strong technical development centre in Hyderabad, but we are also seeing an increase in need, so we are looking at opening a second development centre within India at scale.

There is no other place in the world where you can scale up as much as you can in India around banking and financial services and health care, both from the point of view of the quality of staff and the depth of expertise you can get.

Are they mainly engineering talent that you will hire?
 

About 40 per cent of the talent will be in technical development roles, about 20 per cent will be in revenue sales generation, and the rest will be operational delivery talent.

In terms of markets, while India is the third largest, the Philippines seems to be your largest market?
 

Yes, the Philippines has been a very large market for us mainly due to the acquisitions we have made in the past. But from a purely organic growth standpoint, India has been growing faster than the Philippines, and we have been investing heavily here.

India will probably surpass the Philippines early next quarter both from a total growth and size perspective. We primarily service North America from the Philippines, whereas from India, we service Europe, America, Australia, and across the globe.

From a development perspective and a system engineering perspective, India is really where we see the vast amount of growth coming from. We will be crossing over a billion dollars in revenue from India this year.

As the industry goes through a digital transformation, how are you leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and generative AI (GenAI)?
 

We have been investing in technology for years. We have built a significant amount of mass in our information technology services within India, as well as globally, well before GenAI came along. And nothing’s changed.

Clients want more services in an automated fashion. They want fewer people to service the number of contacts that they have, and they want processes to be more optimised. The fact that we have a new tool called GenAI to help and give better outcomes, I think just enhances our value proposition.

So, while it will have some impact on some manual processes, it will drive better automation. When I hear people talking about the death of the BPM industry, they do not understand the value that we drive with clients from an automated perspective.

Every time we automate work for clients, we see that they outsource more, they get more engaged with the services that we offer, and they grow more with us. So, we see automation as being a benefit. And GenAI is a very good form of automation.

You have made a couple of acquisitions in the past. So, what’s your acquisition strategy for this year or the next one or two years?
 

We are actively looking at the Indian market, and we are actively looking around high-value verticals. The banking industry is very interesting to us, and so is analytics.

Technical development, primarily around large language models and the GenAI application layer, is very interesting to us.

Globally, you will continue to see us invest in more technological talent through acquisitions as well as additional add-ons to domain expertise. You won’t see us do a large-scale acquisition for the sake of footprint. We are in 70 countries around the world.