For nearly a decade, Eli Lilly has been operating a global capability center (GCC) in Bengaluru, India. Now, with its business booming, the company is setting up a similar site 10 hours to the north in Hyderabad.
Recruitment is underway to hire between 1,000 and 1,500 workers, including technology engineers and data scientists, the company said in a release. The facility is expected to become operational in the middle of this year.
Over the last few decades, because of its inexpensive and growing talent pool, India has been a popular location for multinational companies to set up GCCs that perform IT services, customer support, R&D and other business functions. According to a recent report from EY, there are roughly 1,580 GCCs in India employing more than 1.6 million people.
The Lilly Capability Centre India (LCCI), as the Hyderabad facility has been dubbed, will expand the company’s capabilities in automation, artificial intelligence, software product engineering and cloud computing to “meet the evolving needs of Lilly’s business worldwide,” according to the release.
“Hyderabad is a hub of innovation with decades of history in technology and we are excited to announce plans to launch a new center here,” Diogo Rau, Lilly’s chief information and digital officer, said in a statement. “LCCI Hyderabad will bring together engineers across disciplines to create advanced technologies and tools to help solve some of the world’s most significant health challenges.”
Lilly isn’t the only big pharma that has set up a GCC in Hyderabad. In July of last year, Sanofi said it was spending 400 million euros ($437 million) to enhance a site that it plans to grow from 1,000 to 2,600 workers by the end of 2026, making the facility its largest of four global capacity hubs on three different continents.
A November report from Deloitte said (PDF) that there were 95 life science GCCs in India. Other companies with GCCs in Hyderabad include Bristol Myers Squibb, Roche, Bayer, Amgen, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Sandoz.