Egyptian Capital is the top city in the Middle East and North Africa region for outsourcing, according to a new report.
The Egyptian capital Cairo is among the world’s top destinations for outsourced labor.
A report released by global management firms Global Services and Tholons ranked Cairo seventh among cities all over the world playing host to outsourced work.
The report ranks cities’ capacities as global outsourcing destinations for information technology (IT) and business services.
The outsourcing industry is worth an estimated $400 billion globally and includes services like coding and data-entry processes, as well as voice-based technical support.
“Cairo has progressed a lot in the way they have promoted the industry and attracted investment,” Fougutha Singh Gupta, co-author of the report, told The Media Line. “That’s the reason Egypt is one of the great emerging markets and since Cairo has now started to see some kind of maturity in labor pools Alexandria is coming up.”
“Cairo has got the advantage of being near to Eastern Europe and Western Europe,” Gupta added. “It’s not as far away as India and it also has plenty of clients in the Middle East.”
American giants such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have recently relocated some of their firms from India to Cairo, taking advantage of the city’s low labor costs and multilingual population.
“[Outsourcing is] very important for Egypt, and one of the fastest growing industries in the country,” Mustafa Gabr, Media Coordinator with The Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITID), told The Media Line.
The ITID agency is the IT arm of the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, which has been a driving force behind Egypt’s outsourcing industry.
Initiatives by the agency include the Smart Village built outside Cairo, where 35,000 people work, and agency plans for an even larger complex that would offer employment for up to 100,000 people are in the pipeline.
In addition to the top 50 outsourcing cities list, Global Services and Tholons also ranked what they referred to as aspiring cities.
“Amman has just stared coming up,” Gupta said. “They currently have very few global establishments but the Jordanian government is promoting the outsourcing industry a lot by setting up the infrastructure and broadband connectivity.”