The number of GCC clients the company has in India rose to 36 in the last fiscal year from 15, in a period also marked by 90℅ growth in its GCC business where it provides niche IT engineering services to these hubs of multinationals, chief executive Nitesh Banga and India head Piyush Jha told ET.
Rising macro uncertainty globally has made the company take a strategic decision whereby it is enhancing offerings and expanding tie-ups with top clients. The firm, which became a Hitachi subsidiary after the Japanese firm acquired it in 2021, said because more mission-critical work like digital engineering and product and platform engineering is coming to Indian GCCs, engineering services companies like GlobalLogic too are getting more contracts.
“I think of it as an embedded-lab kind of model, where we are working with them (GCCs), sometimes as a sidecar when let’s say they have gaps in their skillsets or face scaling issues. Most of the times, if the GCC is set up in location A, we deploy our support staff in location B. They may not have an interest in going into (that location), but we become a good partner to them to support that speed of growth as more and more businesses come into India GCCs in terms of cost-efficiency or a product-based mindset,” Banga said.
“Earlier, a lot of GCCs were primarily focussed on shared services and backend enablement functions, but increasingly, more and more mission-critical, digital product work and digital engineering work is coming to GCCs. That is an important point for us because we are not an IT services firm. Earlier, the GCC mandate didn’t fit what we used to do, but now they are getting more and more innovation and acceleration-led work, which gives us an opportunity to join hands with them,” he added.
According to Banga, 94% of the company’s business comes from repeat or existing clients and 5-6% is from new clients. He added: “When you are in a recession or a demand constraint, the biggest and most important thing you do is double down on your top clients. You work very closely with them, you create a relationship spectrum which helps them and you in the long term. When we got into this demand-constraint environment in October-November 2022, we put together a clear strategy to deal with it.”
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“Today it’s not only about the demand-constraint macroeconomic picture but also geopolitical stress, especially in Europe and the Middle East, which impacts our business. So we looked at it from three different lenses — we tried to double down on our top clients, increase wallet share with them and find new ways of working with them through new service lines/offerings,” he added.Asked if the company is seeing any tailwind amid the current macro volatility, Banga said: “For us, Japan is the biggest and fastest-growing market in Asia Pacific. Firstly, it’s because of us being part of Hitachi. Secondly, it’s because Japan itself is changing; a lot of Japanese companies have embraced this concept of digital engineering and software-defined enterprise in a big way.”
