A few days ago I was comparing labour costs on the Eurostat’s web site with a client.
He had operations in UK, Spain and Poland. While XL World’s BPO centers are in Romania and Albania.
I realized that labour costs are cut (almost exactly) by half at every step between these countries.
- UK: 4.000 €
- Spain: 2.000 €
- Poland: 1.000 €
- Romania: 500 €
- Albania: 250 €
And every one of these countries has its own value proposition in terms of outsourcing:
- UK: excellent infrastructure and know-how
- Spain: lowest-cost western country
- Poland: first eastern country to enter EU
- Romania: current price leader in EU for multilingual support
- Albania (and others in the southern baltic area): lowest cost emerging european country
It may look as if in this ‘ecosystem’ the smaller fishes are eating jobs from the larger ones. But, as the outsourcing market is still growing fast overall, in this case I suspect the whole is greater than the sum of all parts. Forrester predicts that total spending on BPO in EU will rise from €11.0 billion in 2006 to €18.9 billion in 2011.
