CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu government is targeting to woo global capability centres (GCCs) to set up its base in the state as it generates high-end jobs for youth, according to Guidance Managing Director Vishnu Venugopalan. GCCs are technology centres of foreign companies in India that provide support services to the parent organisations. They used to be called captive centres, but many in the industry prefer the term GCCs, given the growing maturity of these centres and greater autonomy they now enjoy.
Venugopalan told TNIE that after making Chennai the hub of GCC, the focus of Guidance will be to woo more GCCs to set up base in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. “This would help realise the aspiration of our youth to get high-end jobs,” Venugopalan said highlighting the skilled manpower available in the state. Tamil Nadu has been the most attractive location for enterprise GCCs given the talent availability at the intersection of industry domain and technology. It is for this reason reputable global companies such as Citigroup, Standard Chartered and American Express in the 1990s to Ford and Caterpillar a decade later, to Barclays, PayPal and TransUnion in recent years, made a beeline to Tamil Nadu. Recently, global energy major Hitachi Energy and logistics giant UPS launched their largest technology centres in Chennai. Similarly, aerospace major Boeing is expanding its presence in Chennai and it would be announced during the Global Investors Meet on Sunday. Boeing is looking at adding around one lakh sqft space at its research and development centre at DLF in Porur.”
GCCs account more than half of office transactions in 2023 in Chennai, Venugopalan said highlighting that the city is becoming the hub of GCCs. This is backed up by data provided by real estate consultant Knight Frank.Chennai commercial real estate market has registered the highest growth in percentage terms among the top eight markets in the country. Registering an exponential annual growth of 92%, the office volume transactions of the city has increased from 5.6 million sqft in 2022 to 10.8 million sqft in 2023.
“This is predominantly attributed to a robust leasing momentum driven by large space take up by multinational corporations. This is reflective in the 56% of city’s office leasing market share by GCCs and emergence as dominant end user licence or occupier in 2023,” according to Knight Frank.