What will they outsource next to India?

Stuart Corner
Monday, 18 September 2006 07:41

Opinion and Analysis

Try as they might Indians will never learn to speak with an Aussie accent and despite peppering their telesales spiel with Aussie colloquialisms and boning up on Aussie culture: you'll always know when you billing enquiry or request for customer support has been outsourced to the sub-continent. But what happens when outsourcing is less transparent?

The somewhat anomalously-named Eurotechnology Japan, a Japanese company with a 10 year track record of research and analysis of the Japanese telecoms market, reported "With shock and surprise" in its newsletter this week that it had "recently found out that a very famous telecom and IT industry market research and strategy consulting firm with a globally famous brand apparently outsources market research of Japan's mobile phone and telecom sector to India."

Eurotechnology claimed that "The employees apparently are diligently studying the Japanese language in evening classes, so that in a few years time, they will be able to read a little of the Japanese mobile market information which can be found on the internet, we assume."

From this point Eurotechnology drew a rather long speculative bow. "We believe that this explains why so much information about Japan's telecom and mobile phone markets circulating outside Japan is incomplete, or in many cases even wrong. This fact also contributes we believe to the fact, that some of the most famous global companies in the mobile phone sector find it so difficult to succeed in Japan, if they rely on Japanese market research outsourced to countries outside Japan."

The most famous of these is Vodafone which earlier this year flogged its Japanese cellular operations to Softbank. And Eurotechnology was quick to draw parallels with the exodus of some of its competitors, un-named of course. "Similar to Vodafone's departure from Japan, famous global telecom consultancies have also closed shop in Japan, due to the very high costs and the continuous high investments necessary to achieve and maintain leadership in understanding Japan's telecommunication markets."

In contrast, we are assured, "Eurotechnology market reports and our strategy consulting is hand crafted in Tokyo/Japan."

They may have a point. On the other hand, it depends on just what portion of competitors' research has been outsourced to India: if it is simply turning the research data into readable reports written in clear English for a global market, the Indians can probably do a better job than the Japanese.

But which is the "very famous telecom and IT industry market research and strategy consulting firm with a globally famous brand that has taken outsourcing to new heights?


blog comments powered by DISQUS back to top