Mumbai, Aug. 2: The ground is beginning to shift at Infosys. Literally.
Stymied for growth in land-scarce Bangalore, the country’s second largest software maker with revenues of over $3.1 billion in fiscal 2007, is making huge investments in Pune.
A little over a year from now, the centre at Pune will house more employees than its current base in Bangalore.
When that happens, the wheel will have come full circle because it was at Pune that seven founders met on a fateful day in 1981 and marked their tryst with destiny. Two years later, N. R. Narayana Murthy and his six colleagues moved their headquarters to Bangalore — and turned it into India’s silicon city.
Almost 25 years later, frustrated by the breakdown of infrastructure in Bangalore and fighting off accusations of being land grabbers, Infosys has drawn up plans to create 14,400 more seats in Pune, which now has 9,181 seats — taking the total number to 23,581 seats when complete.
Compare this with the fact that Infosys' existing campus in Electronics City now has 20,715 seats; the company is only adding 2,330 seats. Observers say that the quantum jump in seat additions could see Pune having the maximum number of employees (excluding its BPO operations) in Infosys’ domestic setup.
Infosys now has over 75,000 employees; Bangalore has 18,490 employees and 10,750 are located in Pune.
It isn’t clear whether Pune will overtake Bangalore in revenue earnings. In any case, Infosys does not give a breakup of the revenue earnings of its nine development centres.
It’s not only Pune that is enjoying the spinoff benefits from the infrastructure gridlock that has started to choke development in Bangalore. Over the past one year, other cities like Hyderabad and Chennai have grown faster than Bangalore and the net addition of seats in these places is also higher than that in Bangalore.
Infosys now has facilities in nine locations around the country. Among them, while 7,500 seats are to be added in Chennai, 2,850 more seats are being put in Hyderabad and 3,500 in Mangalore.
Responding to an e-mail questionnaire sent by The Telegraph, T. V. Mohandas Pai, member of the board- HR, E&R & administration, Infosys, explained that Pune was seeing the largest addition of seats since the company had the maximum land available to expand there.
“In Bangalore, we do not have any more land,” he added. Infosys is investing Rs 725 crore in Pune and Pai said the facility would be a delivery centre.
However, Infosys is not the only company that is halting expansion in Bangalore due to infrastructure woes in the city. Last year, global engineering giant Siemens AG had announced that it would freeze all expansion plans in the state. Siemens had then said it would opt for other cities which had better infrastructure facilities like Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Calcutta to expand its business.
Sources added Infosys had been looking to expand in Bangalore for more than two years now and that it had made repeated requests to the previous state governments to make land available, but to no avail.
