Time Inc.'s Bangalore Center To Be Company's 'Largest' By Next Year: Report

Time Inc., which doesn't publish an edition of its well-known magazine in India, but has a sizeable back-office presence in the country, is pressing ahead with expanding its center in the country's technology hub of Bangalore.

The company's technology center in Bangalore, Time Analytic & Shared Services Private Limited., will become its largest, Mint newspaper reported Wednesday, citing Executive VP and CTO Colin Bodell in an interview.

“This center is massively important -- by end of next year this will be the largest center in the world (in terms of employees),” Bodell reportedly told the Indian business daily. “We are hiring in domains such as advertising, service space, website extension, discussion forums,” he said.

Time Inc. was looking to double its Bangalore technology center staff to more than 1,000 people, India's Business Standard newspaper reported in May, citing the New York company's CFO, Jeff Bairstow.

Under the terms of New York's state incentive package to locate downtown, the company could cut 900 of the 2,900 jobs it had in Manhattan in 2014 and still keep $7 million in state incentives for locating there, New York Post reported at the time, after the Business Standard report.

Time Inc., which was spun off from Time Warner, Inc. and listed last year, has seen a dip in its print revenues, while digital revenues are rising.

Digital and "other" revenues, which could include revenue from e-commerce ventures and partnerships, are projected to surpass print in 2017, Bairstow reportedly told Business Standard.

Last month, Time Inc. India, the U.S. company's Indian unit, hired Ashis Roy, a former Microsoft Corp. executive, as VP of technology and product engineering, and Riyaz Aftab, who joined from Computer Sciences Corp., as VP for of human resources, according to a press release.