The Offshoring of corporate service functions: The next global shift?

In July 2003, Infineon Technologies announced the establishment of three new centres, in Dublin (Ireland), Kista (Sweden) and Munich (Germany), to rationalize its customer logistics management that had, till then, been handled in 19 European locations. The same year, British Telecom set up two call centres in India, in New Delhi and Bangalore, to deal with directory inquiries, and DHL, one of the world’s leading logistics companies, announced that it would locate a centre in the Czech Republic to manage IT services for its entire European operations. Most of DHL’s IT activities in Switzerland and the United Kingdom would shift to Prague, creating 400 jobs to start with, and growing to 1,000 over two years. Together with DHL’s regional centres in Malaysia and the United States, the European centre would blend into a seamless IT infrastructure supporting the company’s global operations. Meanwhile, ACS (United States) announced that it was building a new 40,000 sq. ft. office complex in Accra, Ghana, to accommodate the growing demand for its data processing services that support clients in the communications, healthcare and insurance industries. In 2004, the Bank of America announced that it would establish a wholly-owned affiliate in Hyderabad, India, to undertake backoffice operations for its units in the United States. The affiliate would employ at least 1,000 people by mid-2005. The bank had previously outsourced software development to Indian companies such as Infosys Technologies in Bangalore and Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai.

Sustainable Development Goals:

Decent Work and Economic Growth