On January 16, Hitachi, Ltd. announced that its U.S. IT subsidiary Global Logic is planning to open multiple engineering centers in Spain. This will be the company's 15th engineering center in 15 countries and its first in southern Europe, with several cities under consideration, including Valencia and Malaga, for a 2023 launch, with long-term expansion to Madrid and Tarragona. The company also expects to hire up to 2,500-3,000 professionals, including software developers and data scientists, over the next three years through local hiring and acquisitions in the same industry.
Global Logic is a leading digital engineering company in Silicon Valley, U.S., which Hitachi acquired in July 2021. The company has over 28,000 employees in 15 countries and supports digital transformation (DX) solutions for various industries. The company's President and CEO, Nitesh Banga, emphasized the government's strong commitment to digital transformation and the depth of its digital talent pool as deciding factors in choosing Spain.
The revised digital transformation roadmap, "Digital Spain 2026," published by the Spanish government in July 2022 and funded by the EU Recovery Fund, will increase the size of the government's budget in the first year (2021-2022) to approximately nine times that of the previous year (2019-2020), and digitalization investments in the previous year (2019-2020). Priority areas include 5th generation mobile communication system (5G) technology, cybersecurity, data economy and artificial intelligence (AI), and digital skills development.
In addition, the "Startup Law," which came into effect at the end of December as the centerpiece of the above roadmap, introduces measures to attract "digital nomads" as well as foreign digital talent to work in Spain. Foreign students who have completed their higher education in Spain can now extend their stay for up to 24 months to find work. In addition, employees sent to Spain by foreign companies and workers from abroad who find employment in Spain can apply the preferential income tax rate of 24% for non-residents for up to 6 years.
IT giants announce a series of plans for hiring digital human resources
Starting in 2022, major IT companies outside of Japan have announced a series of large-scale new employment plans in Spain. In March of the same year, U.S.-based Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) announced that it would hire up to 2,000 people in Spain over the next five years; in November, U.S.-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened a data center in Aragon, northeastern Spain, creating more than 1,300 permanent jobs; and in January, NTT Data Corp. In January, NTT Data announced plans to hire 3,000 new employees in Spain during the same year. It is expected that the competition for digital talent will intensify in Spain in the future.