Central America: BPO & Call Center jobs triple to 80,000 by 2010
Zagada Institute comprehensive and independent analysis on the region’s seven markets indicates:
- Central America domestic and internationally focused agents positions has doubled from 21,000 in 2006 to to 42,000 in 2008, to exceed 80,000 by 2010
- Centers have grown from 164 to 274 between 2006 to 2008
- Costa Rica has now bypassed Panama to become the number one segment from a jobs and total end-to-end service perspective.
- Guatemala has become the number one growth market showing a 450% improvement over the last 24 months
- Over 600,000 students are now attending the regions 206 universities and institutions with over 125,000 graduating each year.
- Avaya dominates the region and with the purchase of Nortel’s Enterprise unit has positioned itself into monopoly-like status
An estimated 96% of existing agents and BPO workers are bilingual and continue to be a critical high-end niche in providing the customer care and back office needs of U.S. companies. The ever-expanding U.S. Hispanic American market is on track to exceed 50 million with over US$1 trillion in spending power by 2012 and U.S. customers are reporting relatively high levels of satisfaction. These twin factors are pushing demand for the region.
“Despite the Nearshore perception of unrest due to the political challenges in Honduras, at its core the region is pushing all the right buttons with respective states deepening their bilingual output, a healthy mix of local and international vendor firms are growing profits by serving clients well, and demand is expanding from U.S. buy-side companies,” said Philip Peters, CEO of Zagada Markets.
The Central America Nearshore market, however, also faces strategic challenges as the market expands. These include the need to further vigorously expand its bilingual-ready population to meet timely U.S. corporate buy-side demand, the importance of expanding physical contact center and BPO office capacity, and the need to strengthening its middle management core as the region’s vendors grow their service delivery complexity.
Source: Zagada Institute
This report grossly underestimates the size of the industry in Costa Rica.
The official published figures -that in my experience underestimates the real size- show that only 6 companies in Costa Rica out of 79 accounted by CINDE on their website, employ more than the 14000 Zagada accounts (Sykes has 2500 people, HP 6500, P&G 1350, WU 1200 & IBM 700, INTEL SS 700).
However as a reference seem to be an interesting report.