Karan Singh Sodi – Managing Director (Mumbai), JLL India
By Karan Singh Sodi – Managing Director (Mumbai), JLL India
Navi Mumbai continues to have the most affordable average rent among all micro-markets of Mumbai. The well-planned city also has a growing footprint of grade-A, and superior grade-A, offices.
In addition, it is interestingly emerging as a hub for captive services too. Captive service represents a segment of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) in which companies utilize wholly-owned subsidiaries in place of 3rd part vendors.
The benefit of doing such an arrangement would be to leverage the cost savings of using offshore resources, while maintaining complete control over process and delivery.Thanks to the availability of land parcels, good connectivity by road and rail to all areas within the Mumbai metropolitan region and access to a human capital of 8-9 million in its proximity, it will emerge as one of India’s most prominent captive hubs for the BFSI sector.
Over the last 12-15 months, banks have either set up offices in this region or expanded their existing captive footprint. Whether it is Axis Bank, IDFC or a multinational bank like UBS (the first multinational bank to have set up a captive office here), increasingly prefer to base their back-end operations in such captive facilities here. Banks and other occupiers are happy after moving their offices to Navi Mumbai from Mumbai and most have either firmed up their expansion plans in this region while some others are in the process of doing so.
While Axis and IDFC have expanded considerably in this satellite city, SBI – that has its global delivery centre in CBD Belapur – is also likely to follow. Over the last seven years, prominent occupiers such as Accenture, L&T Infotech, Capgemini (iGate), Cognizant and Syntel have made Navi Mumbai an established back office hub. Many more businesses are expected to set up their back-end operations in captive spaces here. The preference is especially for the Airoli-CBD Belapur belt, which enjoys better rail and road connectivity.