Layoffs in US will bring lot of work to India: GlobalLogic CEO Nitesh Banga

PTI

New Delhi, March 19

Layoffs by Big Tech in the US are expected to bring a lot of work to India and the country’s IT sector is poised to gain significantly during the slowdown, a top official of the US-based firm GlobalLogic said.

In an interview to PTI, GlobalLogic President and CEO Nitesh Banga said the company is looking to acquire talents in India and plans to grow its employee base by 25-35 per cent every year.

He said India is not going to see much of a slowdown even as there are a lot of layoffs happening in the US.

“If Google, Twitter or Facebook or any of these customers actually lay off people in the US, it’s not that they don’t need to build products. They still need to continue to do their work and I believe that a lot of that work will come to India, because they will still need the talent to keep doing the work, although they will look for cost efficiencies,” Banga said.

The Hitachi group IT company has close to 15,000 or approximately 50 per cent of its global employee base, in India.

“We hire close to 1,000 people a month. Out of that, 50 per cent is in India. So, we are hiring close to 500 people at any given point in time in India. Every year, the number will continue to go up by 25-35 per cent,” Banga said.

The company hires IT and IT-enabled service segment engineers with 2-3 years of experience and then upskills them to become digital engineers.

“The kind of work that we do is very cutting edge, deep product development, be it embedded technologies, cloud, network or apps. What we do is very different from a traditional IT services company,” Banga said.

He said that a premium luxury carmaker designed its gesture-based car experience system in Bengaluru, and 80 to 90 per cent of aircraft engine design and new generation efficient engines design is being done in India.

Banga said there is a conversation that international firms are planning to set up 500 new GCC (global capability centres) or engineering centres in India in the next three years.

“So, the equation is no longer about cost arbitrage, but it is about value arbitrage and skill and talent capabilities. There is a temporary slowdown in the war for talent. We do see this war for talent continuing to scale up for India,” he said.

The company was acquired by Hitachi for USD 9.6 billion in July 2021.

Banga said that integration with Hitachi has added new industry verticals to GlobalLogic like energy, railways, mobility and connected industry.

“There’s a lot of collaboration that is happening across (with Hitachi) - whether you talk about Metaverse, or Web3, or digital supply chains, and so on. That’s one side of collaboration between our Research and Development (R&D) and theirs. But the other piece also is strong support for inorganic push. So, we have big growth ambitions,” Banga said.

According to GlobalLogic, Group Vice President and Head of Asia Pacific region, Sumit Sood, India contributes approximately 30 per cent to the company’s total revenues.

Banga said the India business of GlobalLogic recorded 20-25 per cent growth till about three years back and in the last two years it increased to 30-35 per cent.

“I believe that it can go even faster. But, if I look at just three years ago to the last few years, already, we are seeing like if the company is growing between 20 and 25 per cent, India has grown 5-6 per cent faster and it is going even further. That’s really the way we see it going forward,” Banga said.

He said India stands to gain significantly in this whole economic slowdown from an IT sector or from a digital sector perspective as the need for digital transformation is going to continue across sectors.

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