Roche India arm leases 2 lakh sq ft office space

Swiss biotech major Roche's India arm has picked up more than 200,000 sq ft office space from Brookfield Properties in its commercial project in Pune's Baner locality, said persons with direct knowledge of the development.

Roche Information Solutions India, the healthcare digital entity of the global pharmaceutical major, will be paying rentals of over Rs 210 crore throughout the long-term lease of 9 years.

"The transaction has been finalised and both the parties have agreed upon the terms of the lease. The deal is likely to be registered in the next few days," said one of the persons mentioned above.


The commercial project 45 Icon is jointly owned by Brookfield Properties along with Raviraj Abhinandan Developers.

The project with around 400,000 sq ft leasable area is built on a plot size of over 3.34 acres. Apart from Roche, the commercial tower counts US-based fixed wireless access solutions provider Tarana Wireless and cloud consulting & outsourcing company Infobeans Cloudtech as key tenants.

Last year, Roche Pharma announced setting up its second data analytics centre in Hyderabad, the second such facility in India.

Through Roche Information Solutions India, which was incorporated in 2015, Roche is harnessing the power of data analytics and workflow integration to gain insights that help laboratories in improving patient care with more efficient management of data.

As one of the biggest investors in Indian real estate, Brookfield holds over 50 million sq ft in the country across key gateway Indian cities.

ET's email query to Roche remained unanswered until the time of going to press, while Brookfield Properties declined to comment for the story.

The commercial office segment, which was significantly impacted by the pandemic, has seen a strong pickup in demand in the last 3-4 quarters, boosted by strong economic growth, increased hiring and as employees return to office for work.

Deal activity in the office space segment has so far been witnessing steady growth despite the forecast of a recession in western markets and its likely impact on Indian commercial real estate.

In the largest commercial real estate transaction this year, BNY Mellon recently inked an agreement to lease an entire tower with office space spread over nearly 1 million sq ft in Pune’s Kharadi locality for nine years from realty developer Prestige Group.

Recently, the Indian arm of US-based Cognizant Technology Solutions renewed two lease deals for more than 627,000 sq ft of office space in Pune’s Hinjewadi Rajiv Gandhi IT Park.

In April, Deloitte Consulting India leased over 156,000 sq ft for 10 years at the International Tech Park, also in Pune’s Kharadi locality, as part of its India expansion plan.

Prior to that, Germany-based research publisher Springer Nature leased more than 110,000 sq ft at Gera Commerzone information technology special economic zone in the Kharadi locality for 10 years.