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Staff at a Nanjing-based animation design and manufacturing company work on computers under an outsourcing deal with a Japanese company. [Photo/China Daily] |
Outsourcing of backroom services expected to raise billions of yuan
SHANGHAI -The morning sun breaking through the dense mist casts a surreal glow on the rows of low-rise glass-and-steel buildings in this sprawling industrial park that is the pride of Hefei, capital city of Anhui, one of the less developed provinces of China.
Despite its name, the park, built in 2009, was never meant to be home to the many factories that have moved inland from the neighboring coastal provinces of Zhejiang or Jiangsu, where the costs of labor and land have escalated in recent years. The Hefei municipal government has other plans.
"We don't want to fall behind the development pattern of the coastal provinces," said Sheng Zhigang, vice-chairman of Hefei's Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Instead, "We want to leapfrog into the same higher-value-added services industry as they are focusing on."
Eight of the Chinese commercial banks, including Bank of China and the Agricultural Bank of China, have established their offices engaged in providing back-up services of data processing, customer service and research and development in the park. International logistics giant UPS has also invested 100 million yuan ($15.4 million) in the park for a 4,456-square-meter service center to process finance and human resources and act as call center for the Asia-Pacific region.
In 2010, a total of more than 200 service outsourcing providers realized an aggregated contract value of $817 million, accounting for about 2 percent of the city's gross domestic product (GDP).
Although this may sound insignificant to Hefei's economy as a whole, the city planners say they are confident their efforts in promoting the services industry will ensure more sustainable and greener growth than the traditional labor- and land-intensive industries.
Across China, in some other highly developed cities such as Nanjing, Hangzhou and Tianjin, the industry has already been proved effective and hailed as the "new green engine" of China's economy.
According to the 2010 Report on the Chinese Service Outsourcing Industry issued late in April at the third China Sourcing Summit held in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province, Chinese service outsourcing amounted to 270 billion yuan in 2010, up by 35 percent from the previous year, and it is likely to continue to increase with an annual growth rate of two-digits, as it has over the past five years.
"The service outsourcing industry is rising to be one of the most important industries in China. The country has an ideal environment for the further development of the service outsourcing industry," said Wang Chao, vice-minister of the Ministry of Commerce, at the summit.
According to central government plans, the service industry will account for 65 percent of the country's GDP by 2030, which is estimated to reach $1,770 billion, taking over from the United States as the biggest in the world. The figures are backed up by a Boston Consulting survey.
"The central government has issued more than 30 preferential policies regarding finance, taxation and intellectual property in the 21 appointed pilot cities across the country to give priority to the development of the outsourcing industry," said Wang.
In Dalian, in Northeast China's Liaoning province, for example, one of the 21 pilot cities and a pioneer in the business, the service outsourcing industry has contributed 10 percent to the city's GDP, with an annual revenue of 50 billion yuan.
Although it still lags behiind Bangalore, the favorite destination in India in service outsourcing for European and American businesses, Dalian boasts the country's most established software park where there are at least 500 tenants, of which 41 percent are internationally-funded providers, including Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, Accenture, Sony and Oracle.
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