Study assures offshoring jobs not a concern

LONDON: The rate at which call center jobs will flow out of rich countries will not be as alarming in coming years as feared, independent market analyst Datamonitor informed.

The company said some 241,000 such jobs will move offshore in 2007, with many of them going to Mexico, South Africa and Malaysia.

But in a report it said the total number of call center jobs should grow to 4.78 million agent positions globally by 2007, compared to 4.2 million in 2003.

Of these, the number of positions offshore will have grown only to five percent, compared to 2.6 percent at present.

"The focus has shifted towards selling outsourcing rather than selling offshore," said Ryan Powell, author of the report entitled "Global Offshore Call Center Outsourcing: Who will be the next India?"

"Once firms have outsourced to a third party, it becomes much more acceptable to move that work offshore," he added.

The issue of jobs migrating to foreign countries is an increasingly hot topic in Britain and other industrialised countries as companies announce they are moving a call center or back-room operations to countries where labor is much cheaper -- such as India and China.

Powell said the report helped to demystify the threat that the movement of jobs offshore poses to domestic jobs.

Mexico, South Africa and Malaysia are becoming popular offshore locations. They are growing in stature at the expense of India and the Philippines whose share of the offshore market will drop to 64 percent in 2007 compared with 70 percent in 2002, the report forecast.

© Reuters