German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd opens today (22 November) its new technology center in Chennai, India, where a team of 180 IT professionals will develop software solutions for the maritime industry.
Housed in the World Trade Center Chennai, the Hapag-Lloyd Technology Center (HLTC) will be operated as part of a joint venture that Hapag-Lloyd established with the Indian technology company Solverminds in June this year.
Solverminds has been working closely with Hapag-Lloyd since 2017 in the areas of IT operations support and software development.
“In the Hapag-Lloyd Technology Center, we will be bundling our strengths and competencies,” stated Donya-Florence Amer, CIO/CHRO at Hapag-Lloyd. “HLTC will thereby make an important contribution to our technological transformation. We are continuing to expand our global IT presence and are able to provide industry-leading software solutions.”
Hapag-Lloyd aims to grow the new technology center in the next years. “In the medium term, we plan to increase the number of talents in our HLTC to between 300 and 400 specialists – thereby also grow the talent base and attractiveness of the whole company going forward,” Amer notes.
The Hapag-Lloyd Technology Center will be led by a four-person management team comprising Balamurugan Palanivelu (CEO) and Venkatesh Balaji Ramamoorthy (CTO) from Solverminds as well as Vaishali Shetty (CHRO) and Sameer Saxena (CFO) from Hapag-Lloyd.
“As a port city, Chennai has always been an important business hub and, in recent years, it has become a major centre for software solutions,” said Balamurugan Palanivelu. “All these factors – port, business, software – offer us the perfect environment for our technology center and for developing smart software solutions. We look forward to intensely interacting with Hapag-Lloyd’s global IT teams.”
After Gdansk (Poland) and Hamburg (Germany), this will be the third IT Technology Center of Hapag-Lloyd and the company’s first out of Europe.