US President Donald Trump may not like this. The number of R&D centres being established by MNCs in India continues to rise -a vast majority is from the US -and their headcount growth is particularly strong.In 2016, some 943 MNCs were in India with 1,208 R&D centres -some MNCs have multiple units in the country .This is up from 928 MNCs with 1,165 R&D centres in the year before, according to consulting firm Zinnov's annual report on global in-house centres (GICs).
A GIC is an R&D, business process management or IT centre a company establishes for its internal needs outside the home country .
India, alongside China, has the highest number of GICs in the world, mainly on account of the large numbers of engineering talent it produces, and their lower costs in comparison to mature markets. Uber, LeEco and Di ageo were among the MNCs that established GICs in India for the first time last year.
The number of people in the R&D centres rose 12% to 3.63 lakh in 2016, from 3.23 lakh in the year before.
Total GIC revenue is estimated at over $23 billion in 2016. Between 2010 and 2016, revenue grew at an estimated compounded annual growth rate of 12%. Bengaluru accounted for 35% of the GICs, with National Capital Region (NCR) at a distant second with 15%.
The R&D centres are seen to be maturing rapidly. While they started off in the 1990s and early 2000s providing low-end activities, today , many of them are driving global initiatives and designing and developing products for different markets. Preeti Anand, director and head of engineering excellence practice at Zinnov , said GICs in India now deliver more value with the objective of contributing directly to the headquarters' business.
“From being an operations and delivery centre, the GICs are becoming innovation hubs," she explained.
Some 100 centres of excellence -entities that provide leadership, best practices, and research -have emerged in the GICs. Anand said much of the work in these centres of excellence, as also in many of the other GICs, is focused on digital initiatives, including advanced analytics, cognitive computing and machine learning, automation & robotics, and virtual reality (VR).
These technologies are used to create mobile and web apps, digital marketing and social engagement platforms, commerce platforms, and to get operational insights in real time.
“Indian GICs have been increasingly managing complex projects and have developed end-to-end delivery capabilities," Anand said.
On the BPM (what previously used to be called BPO) side, while the number of new centres continues to rise, people additions have sharply slowed because of increasing adoption of what Zinnov calls robotic process automation. Automation is going well beyond the rule-based automation of the past to cognitive platforms, systems that can understand unstructured data, recognise voice, tone, gestures.
Anand pointed out instances where banks could use these systems to increase the number of account closures from 12-13 per hour to 200 an hour, and where company audits that took 6-10 hours were brought down to a minute.
Despite 30 new BPM centres in India between 2014 and 2016, the country witnessed just 2% growth in headcount in this segment. More than 35% of the GICs are found to have reduced their BPM headcount in the past two years, a lot of that in banking & finance, and in retail.
BPM GICs have realized cost reduction per full-time employee of 15-20%, and Anand said that more cost reductions are likely with the use of robots.
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