INDIA—French drugmaker Sanofi has announced plans to invest €400 million (US$435 million) over the next six years to expand its global capability centre (GCC) in Hyderabad through its arm Sanofi Healthcare India Pvt Ltd.
The initial tranche of €100 million (US108 million) will be invested by the end of 2025, with Sanofi planning to use it over the next year to more than double the headcount at the Hyderabad GCC to 2,600 employees from the current 1,000. This will make the centre the largest of its four hubs globally.
The new Hyderabad hub, spread over six floors and around 26012.85 square metre at RMZ Spire in Hitech City, is already the largest among Sanofi’s network of four GCCs.
The other GCCs are located in Budapest, with around 900 employees, and in Kuala Lumpur and Bogota, each with 250 employees.
The Hyderabad GCC will support Sanofi’s global operations, including commercial, manufacturing, supply chain, research and development (R&D), and digitalization.
Remarkably, the GCC in India will help the company bring some outsourced functions in-house, giving it more control over critical operations like manufacturing, commercial, and R&D.
The Hyderabad GCC gained significance as Sanofi undertook a massive review to centralize and simplify global operations, allowing the company to redirect resources towards more successful therapeutic areas such as immunology.
In her address, Madeleine Roach, executive vice-president of business operations at Sanofi, noted that the Hyderabad hub, set up in 2019.
The hub has grown exponentially from being just a medical hub to now providing several best-in-class services to Sanofi’s global functions and affiliates worldwide.
Roach highlighted that this decision was made last year as part of their next chapter of ‘play to win,’ focusing on building centralized capabilities for Sanofi.
The Hyderabad facility was chosen as their global hub, aimed at supporting global operations and playing a key role in creating capabilities in artificial intelligence and digitalization.
On his part, Sanofi’s executive VP and chief digital officer Emmanuel Frenehard emphasized that the Hyderabad hub will play a crucial role in the company’s ambitions to become the first biopharma company powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) at scale.
He explained that the company will hire software engineers, data analysts, product engineers, and scrum masters to leverage the capabilities of Hyderabad and bring in competencies that Sanofi previously lacked.
He added that this facility will onboard talent to embrace the power of AI across their value chain, harness the pace of scientific discovery, improve productivity, and place better decision intelligence in the hands of their people.
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