Infosys to start new campus in Shanghai, to invest $125-150 million

SHANGHAI: Infosys Technologies chairman N R Narayana Murthy on Saturday laid the foundation of a new campus in Shanghai, and announced plans to treble the company's business operations in China. Addressing a press conference after the foundation laying ceremony, Murthy suggested China needs companies like Infosys as much as they need the Chinese market. "China has demonstrated an extraordinary pace of growth. Such growth cannot be sustained unless it is backed up by scalable, easily maintainable, easily available and easily usable information systems. That is where we believe that there is opportunity for us in China for us," he said. Murthy was joined at the foundation laying ceremony and the press conference by Mohandas Pai, the Infosys board member who will be quitting the company. "I am with the company till June 10. I will continue to work on the Shanghai project even after that. I will work on this project and a project in India for about a year," Pai told TOI on the sidelines of the ceremony. He did not wish to disclose future career plans at this stage. The operations in China account for one to 1.5 per cent of the company's total business volume. Infosys plans to raise it to five per cent over the next three years, Murthy said. The new campus being built on 15 acres of land at a cost of $150 million will be the largest software development centre of Infosys outside India, he said. The company, which has a staff of 3,200 in Shanghai at present, will employ at total of 10,000 professionals by the time the new campus becomes operational, Rangarajan Vellamore, chief executive officer of Infosys Technologies (China) Co., said during the ceremony, which was attended by Indian ambassador S.Jaishankar and Feng Guoqing, Communist Party leader at Shanghai Municipal Corporation. The rising labor costs in Shanghai did not cause much worry to Infosys, which believed in paying high wages to attract the best talent, who can deliver high quality services to clients, Pai said at the press conference. "We will use our enhanced capacity here to deliver high quality consulting and software services to the global markets as well as to our clients in China," Murthy said. The campus will have facilities for software development, labs, data centers, training facilities, food courts, a 1,500-seater auditorium, gym, and other recreational facilities, he said.