The handwriting is on the wall," writes a veteran information-technology specialist who says he has been warned not to talk to the press. Three years ago, the Charlotte (N.C.)-based bank needed IT talent so badly it had to outbid rivals. But last fall, his entire 15-engineer team was told their jobs "wouldn't last through September." In the past year, BofA has slashed 3,700 of its 25,000 tech and back-office jobs. An additional 1,000 will go by March.Corporate downsizings, of course, are part of the ebb and flow of business. These layoffs, though, aren't just happening because demand has dried up. Ex-BofA managers and contractors say one-third of those jobs are headed to India, where work that costs $100 an hour in the U.S. gets done for $20. Many former BofA workers are returning to college to learn new software skills. Some are getting real estate licenses. BofA acknowledges it will outsource up to 1,100 jobs to Indian companies this year, but it insists not all India-bound jobs are leading to layoffs.Cut to India. In dazzling new technology parks rising on the dusty outskirts of the major cities, no one's talking about job losses. Inside Infosys Technologies Ltd.'s (INFY) impeccably landscaped 22-hectare campus in Bangalore, 250 engineers develop IT applications for BofA. Elsewhere, Infosys staffers process home loans for Greenpoint Mortgage of Novato, Calif. Near Bangalore's airport, at the offices of Wipro Ltd. (WIT), five radiologists interpret 30 CT scans a day for Massachusetts General Hospital. Not far away, 26-year-old engineer Dharin Shah talks excitedly about his $10,000-a-year job designing third-generation mobile-phone chips, as sun pours through a skylight at the Texas Instrument Inc. (TXN) research center. Five years ago, an engineer like Shah would have made a beeline for Silicon Valley. Now, he says, "the sky is the limit here."
About 1,600 km north, on an old flour mill site outside New Delhi, all four floors of Wipro Spectramind Ltd.'s sandstone-and-glass building are buzzing at midnight with 2,500 young college-educated men and women. They are processing claims for a major U.S. insurance company and providing help-desk support for a big U.S. Internet service provider--all at a cost up to 60% lower than in the U.S. Seven Wipro Spectramind staff with PhDs in molecular biology sift through scientific research for Western pharmaceutical companies. Behind glass-framed doors, Wipro voice coaches drill staff on how to speak American English. U.S. customers like a familiar accent on the other end of the line.
Cut again to Manila, Shanghai, Budapest, or San Jos?, Costa Rica. These cities--and dozens more across the developing world--have become the new back offices for Corporate America, Japan Inc., and Europe GmbH. Never heard of Balazs Zimay? He's a Budapest architect--and just might help design your future dream house. The name SGV & Co. probably means nothing to you. But this Manila firm's accountants may crunch the numbers the next time Ernst & Young International audits your company. Even Bulgaria, Romania, and South Africa, which have a lot of educated people but remain economic backwaters, are tapping the global market for services.
It's globalization's next wave--and one of the biggest trends reshaping the global economy. The first wave started two decades ago with the exodus of jobs making shoes, cheap electronics, and toys to developing countries. After that, simple service work, like processing credit-card receipts, and mind-numbing digital toil, like writing software code, began fleeing high-cost countries.
Now, all kinds of knowledge work can be done almost anywhere. "You will see an explosion of work going overseas," says Forrester Research Inc. analyst John C. McCarthy. He goes so far as to predict at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the U.S. to low-cost countries by 2015. Europe is joining the trend, too. British banks like HSBC Securities Inc. (HBC) have huge back offices in China and India; French companies are using call centers in Mauritius; and German multinationals from Siemens (SI) to roller-bearings maker INA-Schaeffler are hiring in Russia, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe.
The driving forces are digitization, the Internet, and high-speed data networks that girdle the globe. These days, tasks such as drawing up detailed architectural blueprints, slicing and dicing a company's financial disclosures, or designing a revolutionary microprocessor can easily be performed overseas. That's why Intel Inc. (INTC) and Texas Instruments Inc. are furiously hiring Indian and Chinese engineers, many with graduate degrees, to design chip circuits. Dutch consumer-electronics giant Philips (PHG) has shifted research and development on most televisions, cell phones, and audio products to Shanghai. In a recent PowerPoint presentation, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Senior Vice-President Brian Valentine--the No. 2 exec in the company's Windows un
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