Outsourcing: Sandip Sen, President And CMO, Aegis (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: How large, in terms of the size of the voice industry in the Philippines compared the size of the industry in India? What is the relative scale of that right now?

Sandip Sen: I think the Philippines, for the first time, has just overtaken India in the size of the voice industry alone. Of course in the nonvoice, India is still the largest by far. The Philippines today has close to 750,000 people on voice. India will be a little less. I don’t have the exact revenue data offhand. Remember that these businesses also have a lot of insulated business like transport and catering and all of that. That is really what is happening.

Sramana: What is your Philippines strategy? Are you growing in the Philippines, or are you trying to move out of the Philippines, since it is starting to get a little heated?
Sandip: When we acquired People Support, we were about 6,000 people in the Philippines. We are about 12,000 now. What has happened is that the business has been concentrated in a couple of cities, like Manila and Cebu. We have now opened up centers in other cities. A case in point is a city called Baguio, which we think is a very good place in terms of getting people and is not very crowded. Our strategy has been to move into tier two cities in the Philippines. Number one, and I think the advantage we have over others is that we really have the advantage of having multiple locations. So, we could do similar business in Coast Rica. Costa Rica is a great bilingual English–Spanish market. For us, we have the ability to look at other markets. Our Philippines strategy is to grow, and we will grow much more slowly because of the fact that the market is getting heated. But we will still be a significant player in the Philippines market, and [we] will be looking at new locations such as Baguio.

Sramana: So, in your estimation, the Philippines is Southeast Asia’s big voice call center, voice BPO destination?

Sandip: Yes.

Sramana: Do you have any read on the other part, other Southeast Asian destinations? One of the lessons of the Indian kind of renaissance of the past decade or two decades is that India has been able to use business process outsourcing, call centers, IT outsourcing, and IT-enabled services as vehicles for economic development. And this is something that lots of developing countries are looking at today and using as a strategy. I get pitched all the time from Egypt and all sorts of places, so what is your impression of what is happening in the rest of Southeast Asia? We will come to other destinations in a bit, Latin America and Africa, but let’s talk about the Philippines and Southeast Asia

Sandip: Well, there are other destinations also in Southeast Asia. Two of them are Malaysia and Vietnam. But these at this point in time, are far smaller than the Philippines. Both of these, Malaysia in particular, have English-speaking strengths. Vietnam is very cost competitive. Vietnam is good more on the IT side. So we are seeing other markets in Asia as they will develop, over a period of time. These are the two which are promising at this stage, but none of them have hit a critical mass as we speak.

Sramana: OK, let’s us talk about South Africa. You said you service the U.K. out of South Africa. What are the trends in the South African market?

Sandip: I think the South African market is very interesting. South Africa is the largest economy in Africa. South Africa is very good for the UK because there is a huge cultural fit between the two countries. Half of South Africa is really U.K. [oriented]. Number one, certainly, the time zones are very similar. There is a difference of an hour or two between South Africa and the U.K. The kind of accent they have is fairly similar, so it is a good destination for the U.K. market. They want to look at cost, but they don’t want to lose the cultural affinity and the language skills. South Africa is emerging as a good destination, and we were one of the pioneers in trying to attract international customers to South Africa. I think, over the next few years, you will see that growing much more.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: Sandip Sen, President And CMO, Aegis
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