MindTree announces plans for Hyderabad Centre

Hyderabad: MindTree Consulting, which is engaged in IT services, R&D and engineering / hardware designs, is planning to invest $100 million in its Hyderabad operations over the next five years. The company has set a revenue target of $230 million by 2007 with over 60 per cent growth annually.

Launching the Hyderabad development centre in the presence of Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy, the chairman and managing director of MindTree Consulting, Ashok Soota, said, "We expect the next few years to be a period of accelerated growth for MindTree. In order to address our expansion plans we picked Hyderabad as a natural choice with its talent pool in technology and positive support from the state government."

He added that the company would invest about $100 million in Hyderabad, which would be spent over the next five years. Of this, $25 million would be for infrastructure and other facilities (capital expenditure) while the remaining $75 million would be on personnel-related expenditure.

"We expect the company to achieve 60 per cent growth annually for the next few years, which is more than double the industry growth and the proposed investment in expansion is aimed at this," Soota further said, adding the name ''MindTree'' was originally conceptualised in Hyderabad five years ago.

The Hyderabad centre, which is expected to become fully operational from March 2005, will have an initial strength of 250 and grow to 500 by March 2006. Thereafter, the manpower strength will be doubled, Soota said. He said the employee strength of the company would go upto 2,000 to 3,000 professionals in the next few years in Hyderabad. To accommodate the increased staff, the company would set up its own facility and require 15 to 20 acres of land for this.

The new centre will handle all the works that are being done out of Bangalore including applications development, maintenance, development consulting services, hardware designing, R&D works, IP products and products realisation.