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India will have by 2025 more than 1,900 global capability centres (GCCs) that will employ 2 million people and be worth $60 billion, said a report on Thursday.
Indian GCCs—places where a variety of an organisation's operations are managed—are expected to build competencies, cultivate global leadership and monetize services, said the report called “GCC 4.0--India Redefining the Globalization Blueprint.” The report is published by Nasscom, the Indian IT industry’s association, in partnership with consulting firm Zinnov.
Peer collaboration and customer-centric business development are among factors enabling India’s GCC. “India is at the epicenter of the GCC 4.0 wave, where India GCCs and their leaders are redrawing the blueprint of globalization by going beyond a cost and scale retrospective,” said Pari Natarajan, chief executive officer of Zinnov. “They are helping their HQs solve new problems across business, technology, and people.”
India is an attractive destination for GCCs due to its highly skilled engineering and digital talent, a mature start-up landscape, and an evolved peer ecosystem, said the report.
India had 1,580 GCCs in FY 2023, with several global MNCs opting to establish their first such centre in the country. These GCCs are driving engineering expansion and co-piloting transformation efforts with their headquarters. They are “even becoming beacons of business excellence lighthouse” for their parent organizations, said the report.
“GCCs in India have helped India’s tech industry remain resilient amid the current upheaval in the global market,” said Debjani Ghosh, president of Nasscom. “The ecosystem not only fortifies India’s tech industry but also facilitates profound collaborations with start-ups, academia, and external partners to harness cutting-edge technologies and fuel innovation.”
While Tier-I cities house around 90 per cent of the installed GCC talent, there is a noticeable trend of Tier-II and Tier-III cities catching up. These locations offer operational convenience, cost advantages, and access to a pool of digitally skilled and affordable talent, as attractive value propositions for expanding analytics and operations teams.
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With over 1.66 million installed talent pool as of FY 2023, GCCs in India are acting as core technology hubs for their HQ. They specialize in niche skills around cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. Other such areas include cybersecurity, advanced analytics, blockchain, and the Internet of Things. India GCCs are also playing a pivotal role in exploring emerging technologies such as Web 3.0, Digital Twins and Metaverse, for their parent organizations.
The report said that India’s abundant artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) talent pool offers an enticing prospect for GCCs to establish dynamic Centers of Excellence (COEs). Today, there are over 210 GCCs and 315 centres possessing AI and ML capabilities, with software and internet and BFSI sectors taking the lead in these tech-focused COE initiatives.
In the past two years, the impact of ER&D remains unstemmed, with the sector contributing more than 42 per cent of the total talent growth. IT and BPM industries have also experienced considerable talent progression, with IT talent growing at a CAGR of 9.8 per cent and BPM talent growing at a CAGR of 10.8 per cent. Interestingly, BPM accounts for more than one-third of the total talent added in the past two years.
Besides innovation, the report said that Indian leaders are now helming global portfolios across both business and technical roles. Global roles from India are projected to have an impressive CAGR of 19 per cent resulting in an estimated 20,000 positions by 2030. In 2022, there were over 5,000 global roles present in India, 18 per cent of whom were women leaders. It is also anticipated that by 2030, this ratio will see an upward tick and women leaders will comprise approximately 30 per cent of global roles – a strong progression from the 2022 numbers.
