Hapag-Lloyd opens technology center in India

German container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd has launched a new technology center in India which will be developing smart software solutions for the maritime sector.

The Hapag-Lloyd Technology Center (HLTC) was opened in Chennai, a port city in eastern India, on November 22, 2023.

There, a team of 180 IT professionals will develop innovative software solutions for the maritime industry, strengthening Hapag-Lloyd’s IT capabilities.

Housed in the World Trade Center Chennai, HLTC will be operated as part of a joint venture that Hapag-Lloyd established with the Indian technology company Solverminds in June this year. As a provider of management solutions for the maritime industry, 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 competences,” Donya-Florence Amer, CIO/CHRO at Hapag-Lloyd, said.

“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.”

The goal is to grow the new technology center 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,” Amer noted.

“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,” Balamurugan Palanivelu, CEO of the new technology center, commented.

“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.”

Chennai will become the third Hapag-Lloyd IT Technology Center alongside Gdansk (Poland), and Hamburg (Germany).

The opening of the center in Chennai is said to mark an important step for Hapag-Lloyd and shows that the company sees great potential in India, also with a look at tapping the enormous market for highly qualified IT talent it provides.

With a fleet of 264 containerships and a total transport capacity of 2 million TEU, Hapag-Lloyd is one of the world’s leading liner shipping companies.