Wipro outsources Indian workload to Egypt

Mumbai: In order to avoid under-utilization of its taskforce in Egypt, Wipro has outsourced its workload from India to Egypt. This "reverse offshoring" by sending work from its Indian clients to its offices in Egypt, is a sign of the growing multinational nature of the country's outsourcing companies, according to Zawya.com.

The country's third largest computer services company is also outsourcing business to selected external contractors within India as it becomes more sophisticated in how it manages its capacity following the financial crisis. "We are delivering to some of our Indian customers not from India but from Egypt. I had utilisation capacity available in Egypt and utilisation constraints in India so I leveraged Egypt for servicing Indian customers," said Suresh Vaswani, Joint Chief Executive of Wipro.

Vaswani said Wipro was finding that it could increase its utilisation rate - the proportion of staff busy on projects against those sitting idle waiting for new contracts - by better managing its global workforce. In the Egyptian case, the company had to provide a software package service to a client in India but found it did not have the resources available locally. So it flipped the job over to a few hundred Egyptian employees who were at that point under-utilized.

India's information technology outsourcing industry, one of the most important drivers of urban prosperity in the country, has gone through a tough 12 months following the meltdown of many of its financial services clients. The industry reported 16.3 percent growth in export revenue to $46.3 billion for the year ending in March, compared with a year earlier, but most was in the first half of that financial year, before the Lehman Brothers collapse. In July, the industry forecast only 4 to 7 percent growth for this year, which would be one of the slowest on record, although these figures could yet prove conservative following the recovery in the global economy in recent months.

Wipro is present in 53 countries and has a workforce of around 100,000 out of which the percentage of foreigners is quite less. Wipro is planning to increase this percentage over the years.