India best for Global In-house Centres: Nasscom

Information technology body Nasscom on Thursday said that its recent study ranked India as the number one location for Global In-house Centres (GICs). Nasscom on Thursday started the sixth edition of its two-day GIC conclave.

"This year, the conclave's theme focuses on 'Transforming the Global Enterprise' and aims at sharing perspectives on the role GICs would be expected to play towards enabling the transformational journey for the enterprise," the body said.

GICs (earlier called global captives) operate in India across all service lines - IT (information technology) services, business process management (BPM), engineering services, and product development. Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), software, telecom, and semi-conductor are the key verticals with growing focus in aerospace, health care, retail and automotive. "GICs are also playing a very diversified role for the global enterprise across and are viewed as cost centres, centres of excellence, program management offices, and an innovation hotbed for emerging markets," Nasscom said. New chairman of Nasscom C P Gurnani said GICs were an integral part of the Indian IT-BPM sector and have played a role in contributing to the growth of this sector. "The Nasscom GIC council over the last few years has helped bring diverse GICs together across verticals and geographies and built an ecosystem," he said.

Global in-house centres have become an integral component of the fast growing Indian IT-BPM sector and contribute a 20 percent share in IT-BPM exports from India. The number of GICs operating out of India has exceeded beyond 1050 in 2016 and account for USD 22 billion of revenue in FY2016, employing a workforce of about 7.90 lakh. India continues to be the leading destination for GICs, with over 20% of new GICs being set up in India in the last year.

"These are exciting times for the industry. As technology disruptions create new opportunities for global businesses, GICs have a unique opportunity to help shape this journey. A key theme for the NASSCOM GIC Council is to enable the Neo GIC that can help build new sources of value for enterprise digital transformation. GICs are today focused on catalysing innovation and are actively building programs for partnerships with start-ups, apart from enhancing internal capabilities," Navneet Kapoor, Chair of NASSCOM GIC Council said.