Kuehne+Nagel Opens a Chennai Tech Centre to Build Its Own Logistics Platforms

Swiss logistics group Kuehne+Nagel has opened a Tech Centre in Chennai, its newest addition to a global engineering network. It plans to have around 250 people there by early 2027.

What the centre will do

• The Chennai team will work on Kuehne+Nagel's global digital platforms, including SALOG, its main digital forwarding product for managing sea and air freight shipments.
• Accenture is partnering with Kuehne+Nagel to build up the workforce.
• The company says it chose Chennai for its mature business ecosystem and its record of supporting international operations.

For a sense of size: Kuehne+Nagel was founded in 1890, is headquartered in Switzerland and listed in Zurich, and has about 88,000 employees at roughly 1,300 sites in nearly 100 countries. It leads the world in sea and air freight forwarding and serves around 400,000 customers.

Why a freight company wants its own engineers

Shippers now expect to see where their cargo is, when it will land and what it will cost, without chasing anyone for it. That makes the software part of the product. Kuehne+Nagel's stated reason for building in-house is speed: faster innovation and global scale, rather than waiting on a vendor's roadmap.

Chennai, again

The pattern is a familiar one in Chennai. A global company decides to own its core platforms, sets up an engineering centre, and brings in a services partner to reach headcount quickly. Naukri's September numbers, out the same day, had Chennai's white-collar hiring up 6% year-on-year, second only to Hyderabad among the metros.

A team of 250 is a mid-sized centre, nothing like the million-square-foot campuses that have dominated Chennai's GCC headlines lately. Centres like this, small and focused on one company's product, are a large part of how the city's tech base is widening beyond IT services.

Source: IndianWeb2 — Kuehne+Nagel Expands Digital Engineering with New Tech Centre in Chennai