News: Indian BPOs look at low-cost countries

(ACERC 22/07/2006) Mumbai - Indian BPO companies are increasingly setting up shop in low-cost countries. If you can't beat them, join them, seems to be their motto. Countries in East Europe, South America, Canada are fast emerging as competition to India as a destination for the global BPO industry. Indian BPO companies have also started setting up their own operations in these countries to compete with global majors like Accenture, EDS, IBM, CSC and others.

Cities like Budapest, Bucharest and Warsaw, are being preferred due to their cosmopolitan population which is also multilingual. These cities can service West European destinations in 15 different languages including German, French, and Italian.

Indian BPOs are setting up operations in Dalian, China to service the Japanese and the Korean markets while near-shore locations like northern Ireland have emerged to service clients in UK. Moreover, opening these global centres help Indian BPOs showcase a robust disaster recovery and business continuity plan.

Multiple centres in different geographic locations brings down the overall geopolitical risk of operating as compared to a single-country operation. Wipro's BPO has set up shop in Romania and the reason behind this says Manish Dugar, CFO, Wipro BPO, is the multi-lingual capabilities of the place. Genpact, too, has around 500-1,000 seat centres in Budapest, Hungary, Romania and Bucharest for similar reasons. Apart from multi-lingual capabilities, it is the urge to service American markets that have drawn BPOs like Genpact, Transworks and TCS BPO to locations like Mexico, Canada and Chile.