AMCHAM’s Tamil Nadu Chapter held a breakfast session on June 27th, 2019 on ‘Global In-House Centres (GIC) – Emerging Trends and Increasing Relevance’ with guest speaker Mr. Kamalanand Nithianandan, Partner, EY. The meeting commenced with a welcome by Mr. Rajan Aiyer, Chairman – Tamil Nadu Chapter, AMCHAM, who set the tone for the presentation.

The summary of the presentation by Mr. Kamalanand Nithianandan is as follows: Many companies are building digital solutions that use proprietary data for their businesses in-house, unlike in the past where they traditionally outsourced applications to IT services companies. The oldest MNC captive in India is that of Texas Instruments which established it’s captive way back in Bangalore in 1984. Several MNC’s are building captive centres in India to scale up operations and build newer products and solutions that they take to their customers globally. India is at the center of this action as the country is at the cusp of its democratic dividend, with over 2.6. million STEM graduated produced each year.

Global in-house centres (GICs), or captives, of U.S. and European companies are seeing a strong revival in India, with the multinationals either setting up new units or expanding existing operations as they look to use technology to reinvent their businesses. Moreover, India is seen as a fantastic center for innovation. India has over 1,250 captive units, excluding IT/ITES service companies. Last year, these units hired more people than the IT firms, and are set to hire a further 1.5 lakh people over the next two years and this number keeps growing at a steady pace, attritions notwithstanding. The GICs employed nearly one million at the end of the just-concluded financial year.

GIC’s help businesses to meet the demand of new agile ways of working, where the role of GIC’s is not just confined to systems integration but also to be an orchestrator of services, delivered by collaborating through a number of product and technology partners. The meet concluded with an insightful interactive session.