The Philippines and nearshore locations were the hot favorites. Hinduja TMT was the first Indian BPO company to open a facility in the Philipines. Besides Hinduja TMT, Genpact, IBM Daksh, and 24/7 Customer have their centers in the Philippines, while ICICI Onesource is seriously considering it. Wipro BPO is looking at Vietnam. Eastern Europe is yet another favorite amongst the Indian players, with Genpact having two centers in Romania and Hungary, and Progeon in the Czech Republic. Northern Ireland is becoming another favorite with HCL BPO now being followed there by ICICI OneSource. The Americas have not exactly been the favorite destination though MphasiS BPO was present in Mexico, 24/7 Customer in Guatemala and now TCS BPO in Chile.

The Market Dynamics
By now everyone know the key growth drivers of Indian BPO exports, and in FY '06 there were little indication that India would surrender any of these inherent advantages in the near future. This year, rather, witnessed the consolidation of a few key service lines for the BPO exports sector-finance & accounting, customer interaction services and HR administration finally emerged as the top three in the pecking order accounting for 89% of the total revenues. Voice-based call centers still dominated, the proof being customer interaction services, accounting for 46% of the revenues.

In addition, the high-end knowledge-based BPOs or KPOs too prospered: investment research support, legal services, content development and publishing, econometrics, data analytics, modeling and forecasting besides animation and gaming were the preferred areas. Dataquest, in line with Nasscom, however, segregated animation & gaming from BPO, though some analysts considered that too as KPO. Both third-party services providers like WNS, OfficeTiger or Datamatics Technologies as well as captives like Morgan Stanley, Reuters or even the World Bank were involved in KPO services.

Just like software services, BFSI remained the most prolific vertical for BPO too. In addition to the expanding scope of services in this relatively mature sector, there was a growing trend in 2005-06 towards sourcing higher-end, complex, analytics and research-based services required in capital and debt market investment, fund management, M&A and corporate finance, economic and policy analyses. A look at the client profiles of the DQ Top 25 club vindicates the preference of BFSI players to outsource their processes to Indian players.

The Media as Judge
By and large, the Indian media remained fascinated by the BPO story. The global media, though, was quick to jump onto any failings, especially on frauds related to data security. The local media too shares some blame, especially with regards to their diatribes on the security of female employees, after a couple of isolated incidents which were simply not BPO-specific, or for which the blame could hardly be attributed to their BPO employers. The year started with the Citibank fraud in the MphasiS Pune center, continued with similar incidents of varying magnitude at Slashsupport in Chennai, Intelenet's Mumbai center, 3 Global's captive center in Mumbai and the HSBC captive at Bangalore (that turned out to be a part of the global terrorism network). In between the Sun tabloid sting on employees selling databases for a price brought a little known BPO outfit from Delhi into the limelight. There were confabulations within industry players and plans made in conjunction with Nasscom to maintain a national level database of all BPO employees. But, in an environment where HR heads were under tremendous pressure following attrition rates in triple figures, this plan too remained a non-starter just like the earlier non-poaching agreement.

Employee security was another area of grave concern; the rape and murder of a female employee of HP's BPO outfit in Bangalore, at least, ensured the adoption of more strict monitoring mechanism of the transportation systems. But the recent murder of a female employee of Aviva center, also in Bangalore, by a male colleague had nothing to do with the company. In fact, the lampooning of a whole generation employed in the BPO sector continued unabated; Chetan Bhagat's novel One Night@Call Center was a best-seller and Bollywood movies were planned on it. What many of these critics forgot was that there would be little opportunity otherwise to meaningfully employ so many ordinary graduates and even retired personnel and housewives. And, most importantly, many of these anti-BPO proponents either failed to realize or ignore the fact that the coming manpower crunch could seriously hamper India's most well known sunshine sector.

Rajneesh De
rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1  2