Cognizant's India arm renews two leases for 6.27 lakh sq ft office space in Pune

Cognizant’s India arm renews two leases for 6.27 lakh sq ft office space in Pune

The Indian arm of US-based Cognizant Technology Solutions has renewed two lease deals for more than
627,000 sq ft of office space in Pune’s Hinjewadi Rajiv Gandhi IT Park.
The company has renewed the lease for five years through two agreements registered on April 28. The space is spread over 10 floors across two blocks of Quadron Business Park. The renewals assume significance in the backdrop of the Nasdaq-listed information technology company’s announcement earlier this month that it will lay off 3,500 employees, or around 1% of its global non-billable corporate workforce, and trim real estate costs by giving up office spaces in India. The company’s total workforce is around over 3.51 lakh employees.

For the 260,000 sq ft space in block 4, the company will pay a rent of Rs 1.25 crore per month under the renewed deal, showed the documents accessed through Propstack. For the space in block 2, where it
occupies 367,000 sq ft, the rent is Rs 2.10 crore per month. Together, it will pay more than Rs 201 crore in rent during the five-year period. The agreement for block 4 is from October 2021 till October 2026, while for block 2, it is from December 2022 to December 2027. ET’s email query to Cognizant Technology Solutions India remained unanswered at the time of going to
press Friday. The commercial office segment, which was significantly impacted by the pandemic, has seen a strong pickup in demand in the last 3-4 quarters, boosted by strong economic growth, increased hiring and as employees return to office for work.

Deal activity in the office space segment has so far been witnessing steady growth despite the forecast of
a recession in western markets and its likely impact on Indian commercial real estate. In the largest commercial real estate transaction this year, Bank of America recently leased an entire tower
with office space spread over nearly 1 million sq ft in Pune’s Kharadi locality for nine years from realty developer Prestige Group. In April, Deloitte Consulting India leased over 156,000 sq ft for 10 years at the International Tech Park, also in Pune’s Kharadi locality, as part of its India expansion plan.
Prior to that, Germany-based research publisher Springer Nature leased more than 110,000 sq ft at Gera Commerzone information technology special economic zone in the Kharadi locality for 10 years.