Growth mode

Calcutta, Aug. 7: Genpact, the global business process outsourcing major, is planning to open delivery centres in Latin America, north Africa and east Europe.

The company has recently performed the ground-breaking ceremony for its Bhubaneswar SEZ and plans to use a large chunk of its IPO proceeds, raised in August last year, to fund domestic and overseas expansion besides repaying debts.

“We are planning to set up the Latin American centre first. The Romanian one, too, will be fully operational from this year,” said Shantanu Ghosh, senior vice-president and business leader, Genpact, on the sidelines of a CII seminar on information and communication technology here.

“While the Bhubaneswar centre is coming up, we are working on the Calcutta Unitech campus as well. We are looking at other tier II cities, too, to establish presence,” Ghosh said.

Once completed, the Calcutta campus will be able to house 7,000 people. The centre has 750 people now.

The Bhubaneswar campus will be spread across 12 acres, with five lakh square feet of office space.

“The Calcutta centre specialises in finance and accounting, analytics and enterprise applications. We have decided to pitch Calcutta as the centre of preference in these areas to our prospective global clients,” Ghosh said.

US slowdown

Ghosh said the US slowdown had not affected the company to the extent it had impacted others because 75 to 80 per cent of Genpact’s business came from existing clients.

“The slowdown in decision-making process and uncertainty at the top levels are more with new companies who are just starting to outsource. Since the majority of our business comes from existing clients, we have been shielded to a large extent from the impact,” Ghosh said.

The company has projected $1.8 billion in revenues for 2008.

Annualised revenue per employee in the first half of 2008 was approximately $29,700 compared with $28,200 in 2007. As of June 30, 2008, Genpact had more than 35,500 employees worldwide.