Nearly 500 mid-sized GCCs employ 2.1 lakh professionals in India

Representative image.

More than 480 mid-sized Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India are employing over 2.1 lakh professionals, a report by software industry body Nasscom and management consulting firm Zinnov has said.

These mid-sized captive centres account for 27 percent of the total GCCs and 22 percent of all GCC units operating in India.

A GCC is a captive unit set up by a company to carry out information technology (IT) and related business functions. Mid-sized or mid-market GCCs are set up by enterprises with annual global revenue between $100 million and $1 billion.

The report, ‘India’s GCC Leap: Capturing Global Mid-Market Momentum’, revealed that in the last two years, 45 new mid-sized GCCs have set shop in India, accounting for 35 percent of new GCCs and 30 percent of new units during this period.

While smaller in scale, operating at 40 percent of the size of larger GCCs, these captives are more likely to act as transformation hubs, the report said.

Moreover, India is currently home to about 47 percent of the global product management talent employed by mid-sized GCCs, and over 25 percent of their DeepTech workforce. Nearly 60 percent of the end-to-end product and platform ownership within enterprise portfolios, especially in the engineering R&D segment, is from India.

The report said Bengaluru, Hyderabad, the National Capital Region (NCR), and Chennai account for 74 percent of new GCC units set up in recent years, with Hyderabad alone contributing 25 percent of mid-market GCC talent growth in last five years.

Zinnov’s CEO Pari Natarajan said the most under-rated transformation in India’s tech landscape is the rise of mid-market GCCs, with these scaled-down versions of large enterprises are rewriting the playbook. “Operating at 40 percent of the scale, they’re 1.3x more likely to be transformation hubs and 1.2x faster in traversing the maturity curve.”

Natarajan further said that with GCC-as-a-service models, innovation clusters in Tier-2 cities, and faster market entry, India is set to be the birthplace of global digital-native enterprises.

Nevertheless, the report highlights challenges in talent attraction due to limited brand visibility on college campuses, a lack of standardised processes, and weak innovation linkages with startups and academia.

Rajesh Nambiar, President, Nasscom, said, the next wave of GCCs will not come from size, but from speed, specialisation, and strategic influence.

According to the report, India could attract 30,000-40,000 mid-sized global firms - especially from the US, UK, Germany, and Japan - if supported by targeted policies, faster market entry models, and local innovation clusters.