Multi-GCCs bring a fresh twist to India’s blockbuster GCC story

Global corporations choosing India for in-house centers - to the exception of competing economies - is now well established. But what’s an even greater vote of confidence in the country's capabilities and innovation edge is their decision to set up multiple homes – or capability centers – that are helping offset circumspect demand lately noticed in some pockets of the locally listed, pureplay outsourcing industry.

The expansion of multiple global capability centers (GCC) is expected to increase by 8% in the next 2-3 years, data sourced by ET showed. Nearly a third of GCCs today are on the roadmap to multiplication while 50% aim to achieve this in five years, as per Teamlease Digital data.

Experts said that not only the need for diverse talent, but also the imperative to minimise risks associated with location concentration are some of the major drivers for an expanding geographic footprint for global companies.


The multi-GCCs coming up may be a microcosm of the parent GCC centre, or independent centres driving core transactions and innovation, experts said.

“With focus on innovation and R&D, GCCs transforming to GICs (Global Innovation Centres) are planning to create smaller centres that will hire more fresher talent to manage speedy and robust transactions that will support the core GCCs,” Munira Loliwala, vice president - strategy and growth, TeamLease Digital, told ET.

“These centres will act as either the core development centres with a focus on niche development or built into larger centres to manage the L1 & L2 transactions.”

As of FY 2023, 23% of the GCCs in India have more than two centres, while 12% have three and about 7% have more than three centres. Between FY 2019 and FY 2023, GCCs with two centres grew by 28% accounting for about 365 centres while GCCs with three centres grew by 33% accounting for about 190 centres in the country.

Also Read: India's GCC ecosystem set to hit $100 billion by 2030: report

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, partner at tech growth advisory firm Catalincs, said that this kind of expansion allows tapping into the rich talent that has mobility constraints, attracting specialised talent across domain and technology that’s available only in certain clusters and ensuring risk management and business continuity.

For example, Chennai and Mumbai have deep domain talent in financial services while Hyderabad has a similar profile of talent in life sciences.

“Companies in certain industries have a charter to establish their operational footprint across seismic zones, and so on,” he noted.

From a concentration risk perspective, saturation, pressure on infrastructure and traffic woes in some tier-1 hubs are also triggering global organisations to consider having a second location, said Namita Adavi, partner and head--GCCs (India), Zinnov.

Adavi added that engineering-focused GCCs that have come up in tier-2 locations often drive core product development for the parent company. While they may have started off as a spoke or satellite location, they are becoming hubs of specific products being delivered from India for the globe, and these centres will start to become multi-function like the tier-1 centres eventually.

“As GCCs mature, expanding within India by establishing centres across key locations has become a vital strategy for strategic scalability,” said Vikram Ahuja, co-founder, ANSR, a consulting firm that helps organisations build, manage, and scale GCCs.

These expansions are not merely about growth but deliberate moves to capitalise on India’s uniquely distributed talent ecosystem and innovation potential, ensuring sustained competitive advantage on a global scale, he said.

Also Read: Behind the rise and rise of GCC hiring in India