India has emerged as the GCC hub for global corporations
What began as a cost arbitrage has now become a key source of high-quality talent and leading-edge innovation. Recognizing the value of the Indian demographic dividend, global corporations have set up over 1,500 GCCs in India as of September 2022. The corporations with Global Capability Centers (GCCs) include some of the largest companies in their sectors.
- All GCCs together employed approximately 1.3m people as of FY2021 and are expected to employ ~2-3m people by 2025. For many large global corporations, India has either the largest or the second largest workforce by geography.
- India accounts for over 45% of the GCCs in the world outside of the home country.
- 50-70% global technology and operations headcount are based out of India GCCs.
- From being “executors” to influencing the global enterprise strategy, GCCs are providing services relating to both cutting edge solutions such as cloud, data analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, chip-design, system design, and software development to more administrative and procedural work.
Continuing investments and growth in GCCs have been fueled by the ability to scale up these centers as talent pools capable of supporting innovation and providing services efficiently and competitively.
Success of this sector in India has had a multiplier impact on the Indian economy as this workforce is also a large consumer of goods and services and contributes to savings and investments in the Indian economy. GCCs therefore can support accelerated economic growth as digitization grows in the world, while increasing the amount of business processes being managed from India.
Opportunity to export services talent from India
India must look at services beyond IT and BPO to increase services exports from the country. One area is to cater to growing demand in more skill-based and increasingly digitized services such as healthcare, education, and medical tourism. As of 2022, about 68% of India’s population was in the working age group and about 24.3% of the incremental global workforce over the next decade will come from India.