Infosys plans Rs 1,250 cr campus in Hyderabad

IT major Infosys Technologies, which has presence in 40 countries, will spend Rs 1,250 crore (Rs 12.50 billion) over the next ten years for its new facility at Pocharam, near Hyderabad, being constructed in a 450-acre special economic zone.

The work on the project, which will have a built up area of 5 million sq ft, began formally after the ground breaking ceremony.

After its completion, the Pocharam project will house 25,000 employees to become the world's largest software services campus, according to Infosys Chief Mentor NR Narayana Murthy

Speaking at the Gachibowli campus at Hyderabad today, he said the new campus will have training facilities for global offices. In the first phase, facilities would be created to seat 10,000 people and an initial investment of Rs 600 crore (Rs 6 billion) will be made and the premises will become carbon neutral, achieve energy efficiency, water sustainability and promote biodiversity.

The new facility will have a 25 MW diesel driven power backup to ensure that there is no breakdown across the 120,000 nodes in the Infosys network. The new campus will also have about 1,000 rooms to accommodate outstation employees coming for training.

With this, Infosys will have about 10,000 rooms across all its campuses in India, including the 450 at Gachibowli campus. These can accommodate 45,000 to 60,000 employees or trainees around the year.

It has capital expenditure plans for Rs 1,200 crore (Rs 12 billion) this year and will recruit about 25,000 this year. It has already requited 7,500 in the first quarter and another 10,000 will be added this quarter.

"We are on the track to reach our recruitment target,"  the chairman said admitting that the growth has slowdown to 19 per cent  compared to last year due to the global slowdown. However, it was preparing for the coming year by recruiting people, he said.

All its future expansion plans would be in the SEZs and was open to setting up centres in tier II and III cities later. It was also open to the evolving a revenue model from training the candidates, which is now an in-house activity.

The Gachibowli campus now employs 11,000 engineers and has grown over 80 per cent on a year-on-year basis to touch Rs 2,400 crore (Rs 24 billion) this year from 900 crore (Rs 9 billion) last year. The centre has recruited 2,200 people last year and is identified as a global training facility.

An investment of Rs 552 crore (Rs 5.52 billion) has been made in it as of June 30, 2008 and its exports stood at Rs 2,279 crore (Rs 22.79 billion), contributing 8.7 per cent of the total state exports in the financial year 2007-08.

Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy, who earlier symbolically laid the foundation stone for the SEZ campus, he said the state government has given the biggest junk of land to Infosys due to its capacity building capability.

He assured that the state government will spare no effort in making the city livable by taking a host of infrastructure development including roads and drinking water among others. It is now concentrating on improving the HR capabilities in the state through various academic initiatives.