Indian outsourcing firms led by Genpact logged 47% growth in overseas earnings in the year ended March, a survey released Aug. 20 showed. Export revenue of business process outsourcing, or BPO, firms rose to 209 billion rupees (US$4.6 billion)in the year, said the survey by Dataquest, an information-technology industry publication.
New York-listed Genpact remained India's biggest outsourcing firm, earning 22.22 billion rupees from overseas clients who seek to take advantage of India's lower labor costs.
Dataquest took into account only Indian BPO firms that provide services to foreign customers and excluded the captive India-based units of companies such as HSBC Holdings, Dell and America Online.
The top 20 outsourcing companies contributed 160.94 billion rupees (US$3.57 billon), or three-fourths of the total export pie, Dataquest said. Transworks, IBM Daksh, Tata Consultancy Services BPO, and Cambridge Solutions were the next four in Dataquest's order of ranking with revenues of 15.1 billion rupees, 12.6 billion rupees, 11.07 billion rupees and 10 billion rupees respectively.
The top 20 added 57,784 employees during the year and employed a total of 216,967 people at the end of the financial year in March.
Indian BPO firms are trying to rise up the value chain by diversifying from low-end services such as answering calls from credit-card and banking customers to knowledge-based services that include financial analysis, risk management and equity research. "We expect the Indian BPO industry to redefine rules of the game by setting up non-India delivery centrrs, addressing the knowledge-process outsourcing opportunity, and offering services better integrated with IT," Dataquest chief editor P.K. Roy said.
Most large outsourcing firms opened delivery centers outside India, with Manila emerging as a favorite destination, to be closer to customers and pare wage costs that are rising at home as competition intensifies. Genpact, IBM Daksh, HTMT Global, Sutherland Global, 24/7 Customer, Transworks and Firstsource are among those who now have facilities in the Philippines' capital.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2007
