PayPal renews lease for India headquarters in Futura Tech Parks in Chennai

PayPal, one of the largest online payment processors in the world, has renewed the lease for a commercial building that houses its India headquarters at Xander Investment Management’s Futura Tech Park in Chennai for 10 years, said people with direct knowledge of the development.

Futura Tech Park is part of the portfolio of X Office Parks India, an office property platform sponsored by the global private equity real estate firm. Through this lease renewal, PayPal will get access to 2.6 lakh sq ft of space.

“The lease rental for the space has been set in the range of Rs 60 to Rs 65 per sq ft a month. The agreed rentals reflect the grade A office park’s location and additional benefits that accrue to PayPal by being able to occupy an independent building within the campus,” said one of the people mentioned above.4

Futura Tech Park has housed PayPal’s India headquarters since 2013, when the company first launched its incubator in the country. The PayPal-occupied building on the campus houses PayPal’s senior leadership and over 2,500 employees.

PayPal has invested in setting up three software development and operations centres in Chennai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. The India technology centres are the largest for PayPal outside of the US.

The employees in the India centre work on building PayPal’s payments platform, working on distributed computing, cloud, mobile, user experience, artificial intelligence, data science, blockchain, etc. in providing digital payments solutions to PayPal’s customers worldwide.

Other multinational tenants on the Futura Tech Park Campus include Standard Chartered and Philips. The office campus in Chennai’s technology corridor of OMR Sholinganallur also houses several leading information technology companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro.

X Office Parks has seen robust leasing activity since mid-2021 across its pan-India 11.5 million sq. ft. portfolio. It has already renewed contracts with major companies around the world such as JP Morgan in Pune’s Weikfield Corporate Park and Microsoft and Aristotle Technologies in Noida’s Express Corporate Park.

Hive, the group’s premium flexible workspace offering, has seen a steady increase in its pan-India portfolio occupancy by almost 25% over the last four quarters.

ET’s email queries to both PayPal and Xander remained unanswered.

In an indication of higher momentum in office space leasing activity, the combined net office space absorption has risen to the highest level in the last two years marred by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Data from JLL India showed that across the top seven cities of India, net office leasing rose 113% from a year ago to 11.55 million sq ft in the first quarter of 2022. However, the performance was like the last quarter due to lingering uncertainties surrounding the pandemic.

The technology sector is still the most active part of the market, and flexible office space providers were able to meet the demand for their services.

Founded in 2005, Singapore-based Xander Investment Management is the global advisor and manager to the Xander Funds that has invested over $5 billion in India.