HYDERABAD| 21 July 2026: Global stainless and specialty steel producer Aperam has inaugurated its GCC in Hyderabad, strengthening its digital transformation capabilities to support global manufacturing, engineering and business operations. Aperam Global Services India will bring together expertise across digital transformation, data analytics, engineering, artificial intelligence (AI) and process excellence to accelerate enterprise-wide innovation and operational efficiency.

By consolidating specialized talent across data analytics, engineering, and artificial intelligence into a dedicated sovereign node, Aperam is systematically embedding digital resilience into its global supply chain. For the broader macroeconomic landscape, this launch underscores a critical convergence: legacy industrial and metallurgical conglomerates are rapidly adopting tech-centric operating models, relying on India’s premium innovation corridors to architect the algorithms and platforms that power global operational efficiency.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

  • Digital Capability Hub: The newly launched Hyderabad facility is specifically engineered to function as an advanced technology and business-transformation hub, directly supporting Aperam’s worldwide industrial footprint.
  • Multi-disciplinary Digital Talent: The GCC will aggressively scale capabilities across Digital Transformation, Data Analytics, Process Excellence, Engineering, and Business Transformation, actively dismantling traditional IT silos.
  • Enterprise-wide Digital Solutions: The localized teams are not tasked with routine backend maintenance; they hold a strict mandate to directly build and deploy digital solutions that create measurable enterprise value across Aperam’s international ecosystem.

Headquartered in Luxembourg, Aperam operates as a global producer of stainless, electrical, and specialty steel, alongside advanced alloys and recycling/renewable-material solutions. Spun off from ArcelorMittal in 2011, the publicly listed enterprise commands a global footprint, serving customers across more than 40 countries. With complex industrial operations spanning Europe, Brazil, India, China, and the United States, Aperam is aggressively investing in digital transformation and artificial intelligence to maximize operational sustainability, optimize its international supply chain, and pioneer the next era of intelligent metallurgy.

ARCHITECTING PORTFOLIO ACCELERATION: THE OPERATIONAL MANDATE

“

Scaling our digital backbone is key to driving operational excellence. Expanding into Hyderabad allows us to tap into incredible local talent to accelerate our digital transformation journey.

– Manoj Kumar Agarwal, Group CIO & Artificial Intelligence Lead, Aperam

Managing the complex logistics, supply chain dynamics, and production workflows of a multinational steel and alloys producer requires immense computational bandwidth. The Hyderabad GCC will play a central role in modernizing modernizing these legacy industrial processes.

The facility focuses heavily on high-impact technological domains:

  • Data Analytics & AI: Deploying data scientists to transform industrial and supply chain data into actionable intelligence, driving predictive maintenance, and optimizing global yield efficiency.
  • Process Excellence & Continuous Improvement: Fusing advanced digital tools with core engineering principles to systematically eliminate mechanical friction and modernize business workflows.
  • Engineering & Operations Technology (OT): Bridging the gap between software and the physical factory floor by developing robust platforms that monitor, control, and optimize international production plants.
  • Business Transformation & Shared Services: Leveraging high-velocity automation frameworks to streamline complex, cross-border corporate functions, including finance, logistics, and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Aperam’s digital capability expansion is inextricably linked to its core mission of sustainable manufacturing. As a global leader in recycling and renewable materials, the enterprise requires sophisticated technology to track carbon footprints, optimize scrap metal usage, and manage energy consumption across its electrical steel divisions.

The Hyderabad GCC is expected to support Aperam’s sustainability agenda by enabling data-driven monitoring, operational optimization and digital capabilities that can strengthen initiatives around recycling, energy efficiency and circular manufacturing. The software engineered in the Hyderabad GCC will serve as the critical infrastructure enabling Aperam to meet strict European environmental regulations, optimize its circular economy initiatives, and pioneer the next era of “Green Steel” through algorithmic precision.

Industry Insights

  1. Manufacturing Becomes Digital-First: Historically, advanced capability centers were the exclusive domain of software companies or financial institutions. The heavy investment by an industrial titan into a digital-first GCC highlights that manufacturing is rapidly becoming a software-defined sector. The competitive moat for future heavy industries will lie in algorithmic efficiency and data architecture just as much as physical production output.
  2. The Evolution of the Industrial GCC: The era of utilizing Indian hubs exclusively for repetitive shared services is permanently closing. Modern manufacturing GCCs are functioning as enterprise innovation hubs, generating proprietary intellectual property and driving end-to-end enterprise innovation.
  3. Hyderabad Strengthens Its Manufacturing GCC Proposition: The selection of Hyderabad reinforces the city’s status as a premium destination for complex R&D. By anchoring in this high-density technology ecosystem, Aperam sidesteps talent acquisition bottlenecks, gaining frictionless access to a mature talent pool spanning cloud computing, AI, and business-process engineering.
  4. Industrial GCCs Are the Next Growth Wave: While technology, banking and financial services have traditionally dominated India’s GCC landscape, global manufacturing companies are increasingly establishing capability centers focused on engineering, AI, industrial automation and digital operations. This diversification is expanding the strategic role of GCCs and creating new opportunities for specialized talent across manufacturing and Industry 4.0 domains.

WAY FORWARD

Aperam’s Hyderabad GCC is a definitive milestone in the industrial sector’s digital maturation and reflects the continued evolution of manufacturing GCCs from operational support centers to strategic innovation hubs. As manufacturers increasingly integrate AI, data analytics and digital engineering into core operations, India continues to strengthen its position as a preferred destination for building high-value global capabilities. The investment also reinforces the growing role of GCCs in enabling sustainable manufacturing, operational resilience and enterprise-wide digital transformation.

Curated by SSF Global

Tracking the shifts shaping GCCs, enterprise ecosystems, and the future of global business.

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SSF Global is a Global Community for Enterprise Function Leaders and serves as a research & advisory platform focused on Global Business Services (GBS), Global Capability Centres (GCCs), and the evolution of enterprise innovation in India and beyond. We track, publish, and partner in narratives that shape how capability centres transform into hubs of trust, intelligence, and sustainable growth. We also evaluate, assess and benchmark the GCCs for their performance, maturity and other parameters using our proprietary tools built from the knowledge gained from direct interaction with our members (GCCs & GBS).