British Petroleum to hire 2k employees, set up centre in Pune; Dharmendra Pradhan welcomes move

In a major development, multinational oil and gas company British Petroleum (BP) has confirmed that it plans to set up a major new centre for its global business services (GBS) operations in Pune, Maharashtra. The new centre will employ around 2000 people and will support digital innovation across BP globally. The centre is expected to begin operations by January 2021 and will provide business processing and advanced analytics capabilities in support of BP businesses worldwide.

The new centre in India will assume operational ownership of third-party business processes and seek to further extend its work with analytics and data science capabilities to pursue better business outcomes.India is a growing market with growing digital talent pool.

The new centre in India will allow BP to tap into this pool and will lead company’s development and application of cutting-edge digital solutions.

Welcoming this development, Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Steel Dharmendra Pradhan said, “I welcome BP's move to establish a major new global business services centre in Pune. The new centre once operational will create opportunities for the growing local digital talent pool in India and will employ 2000 people to support its global businesses.”

Earlier, it was reported that amid the coronavirus pandemic and its severe impact on the oil market, British Petroleum decided to lay off 10,000 employees from its workforce globally by the end of the year. The total people to be laid off represent 15 per cent of the 70,000 strong global workforce of the oil giant.

BP's CEO Bernard Looney, in an email, told the employees that the job cuts were essential to help the company to tide over the global collapse in oil demand on the back of the coronavirus pandemic."You are already aware that, beyond the clear human tragedy, there has been widespread economic fallout, along with consequences for our industry and our company,"said Looney's mail.