Global Capability Centres (GCCs)

Imagine a global bank or retailer that, instead of hiring an Indian IT services company like TCS or Infosys to build and maintain its software, decides to simply open its own wholly-owned office in Bengaluru or Hyderabad, hiring Indian engineers directly onto its own payroll to do exactly that same work in-house. That's precisely what a Global Capability Centre, GCC, is, and this model has grown into a genuine parallel track alongside, and increasingly competing with, the traditional outsourced IT services model this industry built its reputation on.

The scale is now considerable, India hosts over 1,800 GCCs, employing roughly 1.9 to 2.0 million professionals and generating more than $64 billion in annual revenue, figures that have grown from around 1,700 centres as recently as FY2024, a genuinely fast expansion that puts GCCs on a trajectory to reach 2,100 to 2,400 centres and roughly $105 billion in revenue by 2030.

This shift matters because it changes who actually captures the value of India's engineering talent, GCC employees work directly for the global company, GE, JPMorgan, Walmart and hundreds of others, rather than for an Indian services vendor billing that company for outsourced work, meaning a growing share of India's tech talent and revenue increasingly flows through in-house global company structures rather than through the traditional TCS-Infosys-Wipro services model.

The GCC boom and the entry-level hiring collapse covered elsewhere on this site are connected in a way worth understanding, GCCs tend to hire more selectively for specialised, higher-skill roles rather than bulk entry-level batches, meaning even as GCCs grow revenue and headcount briskly, that growth doesn't necessarily replace the mass campus hiring the traditional IT services model used to provide.