Global software major Wipro Ltd has set up a business process outsourcing (BPO) centre at Curitiba in Brazil to provide shared services to AmBev, the largest brewery in Latin America, the IT bellwether said here late Friday.The shared services will be in finance and accounting, order management, customer care and HR (human resource) activity spanning AmBev’s operations across Latin America, the Bangalore-based company said in a statement.

“We have expertise in delivering process specific solutions in finance & accounting, procurement, HR services, loyalty services and knowledge services. Our capability to transform processes, implement SAP and provide world class service delivery is a strength unmatched by competition,” Wipro BPO head Ashutosh Vaidya said.

AmBev zonal vice president Renato Nahas Batista said the partnership with Wipro would transform his company’s shared service centre across the southern continent.

“We are honoured to be a part of Wipro’s expansion plans in Brazil and Latin America,” Batista noted. AmBev is reputed in South America’s brewery business with leading brands like Brahma, Becks, Stella and Antarctica. (more…)

The Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), in a briefing, said revenues could surpass targets next year because of this development. This year’s goal of 35-40% growth in revenues to $7 billion remains on track, officials said, even as a global crisis rages.  “We are part of the solution, not part of the problem,” BPAP Chief Executive Officer Oscar R. Sañez said in an interview.

The group’s Roadmap 2010, which it launched late last year, targets annual growth of 40% with revenues hitting $12 billion in 2010 and a workforce of close to a million people, from less than $5 billion in revenues and 300,000 employees last year.  Revenues for 2009 were projected to grow to around $9.6 billion “but we may pass it,” Mr. Sañez said. By 2010, outsourcing is expected to grow to a $130-billion global industry. The BPAP expects to service around 10% of this market by that time, with the Philippines as the world’s second largest outsourcing destination next to India.

“This is an industry that is bringing good news to the Philippines as a destination for [foreign] investments,” Mr. Sañez said.  Canadian research firm XMG, Inc. recently slashed its growth outlook for the global outsourcing sector to 24.2% from 34.7% annually until 2010 as a result of the global economic slowdown. The growth projection for the Philippines’ BPO industry was also downsized to 25.6% from 31.2% .  Full News

Anandita Mishra, an assistant manager in a Reliance BPO, was brutally murdered by colleague whose advances she rejected.

Anandita’s daughter Ahana misses her mother but can’t say it. Anandita Mishra left for work on September 16 and never returned. The Reliance BPO employee was murdered by her colleague Jacob Pinto whose advances she had rebuffed. The five-year-old Ahana has cerebral palsy. Now her 70-year-old grandmother is now her only guardian.

“She came here only for the child. She left home because she wanted to get her good treatment,” said Purnima Goswami, Anandita’s mother.

Anandita would cross the road near her office every evening so she could save some money on auto fare. The journey of her life was full of hardships. That journey met with an unfortunate end here. Anandita separated from her husband because he did not want a handicapped child. She came to Navi Mumbai with her mother to build a new life. But trouble stalked her there as well.

“When the threats started coming, I told her not to come home alone. she said for how long can someone accompany me. I have to manage alone,” said Purnima Goswami. Ahana needs medicines and regular physiotherapy, which is an expense of close to Rs 5000 per month. Tough days seem to be there ahead for the bereaved family. Source

MUMBAI, Oct 24 (Reuters) - The rupee was holding steady just above 50 per dollar in afternoon trade on Friday helped by suspected Reserve Bank of India intervention but heavy losses in the local stocks continued to weigh.

* At 12:40 p.m., the partially convertible rupee was at 49.94/95 per dollar, off a low of 50.15, and weaker compared with 49.81/82 at close on Thursday.

* The BSE Sensex fell as much as 8.5 percent to trade below 9,000 points for the first time since June 2006 on Friday after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)left policy unchanged at a review and lowered its economic growth forecast.

* Dealers said month-end dollar demand from importers was also pressuring the rupee but likely dollar sales by the RBI via state-run banks helped the rupee recover some of its losses.

 A weak rupee helps big Indian technology companies that export computer services.

Eager to tap into the multi-billion dollar global BPO (business process outsourcing) industry, the Ugandan government has developed a BPO strategy that should allow the country to become a preferred BPO destination in the East and Central African region. The draft strategy, which has been discussed by the Presidential Investors Round Table task force, is now before Cabinet.

“Cabinet has to approve it, and then it will go before the president, but operationally, its implementation under this ministry is already ongoing,” Lawrence Mulinda, a senior systems analyst in the Ministry of ICT, said in an interview.

The strategy is expected to be adopted before the end of the year, Mulinda said, at which point requisite funding will be provided for implementation. 
 
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On an international level, however, several companies have expressed interest in setting up BPO investments in Uganda, including Quest Holdings of South Africa and HTMT Global Solutions, a subsidiary of the Hinduja Group of India. Full News

Satyam Computer Services hopes that Satyam BPO (formally known as Nipuna) will be out of the red and begin to make profits in the next two years.

“The scope for the BPO business is quite huge. We (the industry) have just touched the tip of it. The arm has registered revenues of Rs 55.62 crore, showing a growth of 15 per cent, in the second quarter. This has helped us cut losses to Rs 20 crore even after absorbing forex losses,” V. Srinivas, Chief Financial Officer of Satyam, said.

Stating that the arm would start making profits in the next two years, he told Business Line that the animation project would come back to the company. “It was stopped as the work on shooting of the movie stopped. It will soon resume and we expect it to be shown in the books in the next two quarters,” he added.

He, however, pointed out that it was just one aspect of the business. Besides, the voice business contributed just 25 per cent to the revenues. The high-end transaction process business gave us 75 per cent. On currency hedging policy, he said the company had decided to stick to the 50:50 hedging strategy. “It is not a money earning mechanism. We gain or lose equally, giving us the minimal shocks,” he said.  Source

ExcelAsia started in Cebu in 2005 with Convergys as its first client. It has since expanded into Metro Manila and has trained so-called “near-hires” or applicants that did not qualify on their first try, which received scholarships subsidized by the government. On the average, the company’s Cebu office trains 200 to 300 people every month.

Rita Trillo-Ugarte, ExcelAsia president, expects this to increase to at least 400 per month. “We are expanding our services in Cebu by adding training and recruitment rooms. We also plan to expand our business development team there,” she said. Aside from near-hires, ExcelAsia trains college graduates for free and gets paid whenever call centers hire from its talent pool.

One of its new clients is Wipro, one of the top outsourcing firms in India that established a facility in Cebu earlier this year. Other regular ExcelAsia clients include People Support and TeleTech, two of the biggest call centers in terms of workforce.

Cebu was ranked number one among this year’s “Top 50 Emerging Global Outsourcing Cities” announced earlier this month by industry analyst Tholons.

According to the Cebu Educational Foundation for Information Technology, call centers and BPO firms in Cebu now employ more than 20,000 workers. Source

JSS BPO, has drawn up a plan to set up a 300-seater call centre in Noida and the facility is expected to be operational within two months. “We will hire 350 professionals for our proposed call centre in Noida. Our 50-seater call centre in Kolkata became operational last month and this centre has 100 professionals working in two shifts”, Bijoy K Sahoo, chairman of JSS Group told Business Standard.

JSS BPO is also aiming to ramp up its headcount in the city from the existing 600 professionals to 1,000 professionals by March next year. JSS BPO’s plans to expand its presence in other locations and scale up its headcount has come in sync with other BPO firms who have stepped up hiring despite global financial meltdown. While Capita, UK’s largest BPO has announced plans to hire 1,000 people for its India centre, Infovision and Convergys plan to add 5,000 and 2,500 people respectively to their current workforce in 2008-09. Aricent which has over 6,000 employees in India had recently announced to raise its global headcount by up to 10 per cent by the year-end with special emphasis on its India operations.

Sahoo said that the financial meltdown has not impacted the operations of JSS BPO as 80 per cent of its clients are in the domestic market. JSS BPO recorded a 10 per cent growth in its revenues in the last quarter of this fiscal. JSS BPO offers a wide array of products and services including accounting services, call center, data base management, document management, human resources, customer relationship management, training in information technology enabled services, transaction processing and software development. Its customer base includes companies like Citi Bank, Axis Bank, e- Serve, Citifinancial, TATA AIG, Centurion Bank and HDFC Mutual Fund to name a few. (more…)

It is predicted that the emerging No. 1 US bank, JPMorgan Chase and Co., would soon aggressively offshore more back- office jobs to the Philippines. “We do not see any significant fallout from the recent collapse of a number of  US banks, or their absorption by larger rivals,” said Catanduanes Rep. Joseph Santiago, chairman of the House information and communications technology committee.

“When American firms slash costs due to mergers or an economic slowdown, the first to go tend to be high-paying US-based jobs. They hardly bother to reexamine toward scaling down their low-cost outsourcing activities here, at least not on the basis of cost,” he said.

US financial institutions, along with telecommunication, Internet, direct broadcast and cable-TV providers, are among the biggest clients of Philippine BPO firms. One of them is 119-year-old Washington Mutual Inc. (WaMu), the erstwhile largest American thrift and savings closed by the US government, and its banking assets sold at a fire-sale price to JPMorgan.

WaMu has been a key client of PeopleSupport Inc., which runs three contact centers that employ around 8,000 college-educated, fluent English-speaking Filipinos. “Among US banks, JPMorgan is the most comfortable with the Philippines. The bank has been here for 47 years. It has become totally acclimatized to our political and economic conditions,” Santiago said. (more…)

Its been a long long time since General Electric has been the largest client of Tata Consultancy Services. However, this is set to change. 

With TCS inking a deal with Citigroup, the US financial giant would become its largest customer and revenue contributor. TCS is acquiring the Indian back office of Citi, which has 12,000 employees, for $505 million, and has also struck a deal, which would assure a steady revenue for nearly nine-and-a-half years.

The price which TCS is paying is nearly two times of the BPO arm’s revenues, which analysts term to be an expensive deal given the current market environment. Post the deal, Citi would contribute $280 million per year, against GE’s contribution of $200 million to TCS revenues, thus over taking GE as the largest client. Citigroup Global Services, earlier known as E-Serve International had been valued at Rs 1,200 crore, when the stock was delisted from the bourses.

The Citi deal, however, would catapult TCS to the number two position in the BPO space after Genpact.
Citi has been TCS’ customer since 1992 and the latest deal is expected to enhance TCS’s expertise in the banking sector. ‘‘This transaction would complement our domain expertise and bring new capabilities to TCS that will help drive growth,” said S Ramadorai, CEO and MD, TCS.

For Citi, the sale is in line with its strategy to remain ‘‘a fit company”, reduce its operating expenses related to BPO and will allow to focus on our core financial services competencies, said Citi India head Sanjay Nayar. Citigroup Global Services (CGSL), with offices in Mumbai, Chennai and Gurgaon, provides services to Citigroup’s consumer, corporate and global wealth management businesses globally. TCS intends to retain CGS management team.

The company earns 43% of its revenues from North America, 26% each from Emerging market economies and India and 5% from APAC region. Some analysts viewed the acquisition to be positive and it would give the software services firm the much needed visibility and stability with a large customer on the backdrop of the current market situation. Source