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India Will Be Capgemini’s Digital Repository: CEO Hermelin
BENGALURU: India is core to the 13-billion euro Capgemini. The country accounts for 50% of the company’s 2 lakh employees. So, as the world moves to new digital technologies, Paul Hermelin, chairman and group CEO of the French IT company, is undertaking a massive reskilling programme to create a tight association of India to digital, and make India the company’s digital repository.
The digital and cloud portfolio represents 42% of Capgemini’s revenue and is growing at 20% annually. In an exclusive interaction with TOI on a visit to India on Thursday, Hermelin spoke about the digital growth trajectory. Excerpts:
Can you elaborate on India’s role in digital?
The motto of digital is speed. It’s an iterative process. To grow faster, we need to reuse some use cases. All the use cases will be in India. The repository of knowledge for digital will be in India and there is no better place with abundance of skills and experience. In a couple of years, India will become a digital repository and if clients want speed, they have to use the repository.
You have been hiring aggressively and you have 100,000 employees in India now. Will hiring taper off?
With 100,000 people, we have the kind of stature we need in India. We added some Indian platforms through some acquisitions which are far more targeted. We’ve progressively replaced a lot of French, Dutch, Americans with Indians. Even if the group was not growing that much, in India we were growing 20%. Today, we’ve reached the level of Indian sourcing that we need. We will add people, but it’s not a volume game.. My bet is surge of digital skills will more than compensate the impact of industrialisation.
