Dell Inc, the world's biggest maker of personal computers, said on Monday it would push deeper into low-cost countries by hiring another 1,200 staff for a call centre in India and building a factory in eastern Europe. Michael Dell, Texas-based Dell's 40-year-old founder and chairman, opened the company's third Indian call centre on Monday in the northern state of Punjab.
Dell, the world's 18th-richest man, with a personal wealth estimated at $16 billion by Forbes magazine, said he expected the new centre to have about 1,500 workers in a year, compared with just 300 now.
The company employs more than 7,000 people in India, its largest workforce outside the United States. "I think India will also represent a great market for us. The business is expanding at a very rapid rate," Dell told employees in the industrial township of Mohali. "Certainly the scale of India is pretty awe-inspiring."
Dell has one call centre in the southern city of Hyderabad and another in India's technology capital, Bangalore, to handle customer care, offer technical support and for application development.
India's flourishing business process outsourcing (BPO) sector has become a magnet for global companies such as General Electric and American Express. The sector is expected to clock sales of $5.7 billion in the year to March 31, a growth of 44 percent over the last fiscal year.
Heavy demand for outsourcing of services such as payroll processing and insurance claims has helped the industry grow at a compounded annual rate of 56 percent since 2000.
Analysts say companies like Dell save 40-50 percent on costs by outsourcing work to India, which has one of the world's largest English speaking IT pools. Close to 120,000 trained IT professionals and 3 million other graduates are added each year to the workforce.
The BPO industry expects to add 94,500 jobs in this business year, and is forecast to exceed a million people by 2007/08.
Although Dell did not mention the exact investment plans for India, he said the computer giant - which competes with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Fujitsu and Toshiba - had invested "tens of millions of dollars" in the country.
"Asia is a rapidly growing part of the world for us. We are also growing in Europe and the US," Dell told reporters.
Comments
Comments are closed.