20,000-plus people shift as IT firms buy GCCs and captive tech carve-outs (opens the source in a new tab)
- More than 20,000 employees moved from GCCs, enterprise IT units and product operations to IT services firms in the past 12 months; analyst Pareekh Jain expects similar numbers in the next 12.
- TCS took over Best Buy’s India GCC; HCLTech bought Guardian Life’s India operations for $10.5 million (nearly 2,000 staff); Wipro paid $386 million for Olam’s Mindsprint (3,200+ staff), tied to an eight-year deal expected to bring over $1 billion.
- HFS’s Achyuta Ghosh says about 10% of mature GCCs could be fully or partly transferred in two to three years, mostly operations-heavy, labour-intensive centres; deals usually involve 500–3,000 staff.
- 20,000+
- staff moved, 12 mo
- ~3,000
- pure GCC moves
- ~10%
- GCCs may transfer
Why it matters In a low-growth market, IT firms are buying growth with long contracts attached, and thousands of staff are changing employers.
Other side Is this a vote of confidence in IT firms, or a sign that many GCCs never reached scale? And how do transferred staff fare once AI-led productivity is priced into the contract?