They bring good things to Romania

GE goes East! One good, comprehensive article on outsourcing, in FT today, on Business Life. A few excerpts:

How many Korean-speaking accountants are there in China, and how do you recruit and train them? You may not expect the head of an India-based outsourcing company to need answers to questions like these, but Pramod Bhasin does. He is president and chief executive of Genpact, the former “captive” outsourcing unit of General Electric that was known until Tuesday as Gecis Global. The new name aims to reflect the company’s independence from the US group, achieved at the end of last year.

Given the pace at which Genpact is hiring – 800 to 1,000 people worldwide each month – and training – 7,000 to 8,000 people a year – this is no easy task, and it has prompted an international search for talent. “It’s our job to tap into the intellectual capacity of a country,” says Mr Bhasin. “If we need engineering skills and they are available in Romania, that is where we go.”

However, each country in eastern Europe tends to run out of capacity pretty quickly, he says, and this pushes up salaries and other costs. Hungary, where ­Genpact established operations in 2002, has already become more expensive, he says, and that was partly why the company opened a facility in Romania this summer. The new unit currently employs only about 50 people, but Mr Bhasin predicts this will increase quickly to 500 to 600, and could eventually exceed 1,000.

The biggest foreign operation is Mexico, where the company has 2,500 employees in two cities, Ciudad Juarez and Caborca, providing English and Spanish-based services to its mainly US clients. In Asia, Gecis set up operations at Dalian in China in June 2000. Already it employs about 1,500 people there. In Europe, the company’s Budapest-based subsidiary began operations in September 2002, expanding into a second building in May this year. Employment is about 670.

Earlier this month, the company’s Romanian facility was officially opened in north Bucharest. Employment is approaching 170, but there is room for 1,500 workers. The company’s increasingly multilingual workforce puts it in a better position to handle pan-European work from eastern Europe. The whole of GE in Europe, for example, is served from Budapest and Bucharest, along with a carmaker and an office equipment manufacturer.