Ocean freight carrier Hapag-Lloyd AG this week launched a technology center in India to strengthen its information technology (IT) capabilities, operating as a joint venture with Solverminds, a provider of management solutions for the maritime industry.
Located in Chennai, a port city in eastern India, the Hapag-Lloyd Technology Center (HLTC) will host a team of 180 IT professionals charged with developing innovative software solutions for the maritime industry. It becomes the third Hapag-Lloyd IT Technology Center alongside Gdansk (Poland) and Hamburg (Germany).
First announced in June, the center is slated to grow quickly in the next few 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,” Donya-Florence Amer, CIO/CHRO at Hamburg, Germany-based Hapag-Lloyd, said in a release.
The HLTC 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,” Palanivelu said in a release. “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.”
