Nanjing to fete top outsourcing firms

Nanjing is among the nation's leading cities for service outsourcing. Provided to china daily

The list of the outstanding professionals in China's outsourcing for 2009 will be announced in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, next Friday night.

Part of the third China International Service Outsourcing Cooperation Conference to be held from June 11 to 12, the awards ceremony honors entrepreneurs who made valuable contributions to the nation's outsourcing service industry and encourages more to become involved in the sector, said Wang Shouwen, vice-mayor of the host city Nanjing.

The event will also provide small and medium-sized enterprises an opportunity to establish contact with the leading industrial players and hear the successful experiences of award winners, Wang noted.

In addition to the awards ceremony, the two-day conference will include a series of seminars and forums on the latest changes in industrial policies, Wang said.

Since its start in 2008, the annual international conference has attracted wide attention from home and abroad.

This year some 40 outsourcing business providers well known nationwide, 40 provincially famous companies and nearly 300 Nanjing firms are expected to gather at the conference and benefit from "business cooperation potential in various fields", Wang said.

"With convenient transportation, deep research and educational resources, favorable policies and a friendly environment, Nanjing enjoys distinct advantages in developing the service outsourcing industry," the vice-mayor said.

The city government has long attached great importance to the sector and views its growth as strategic to the local economy, Wang noted.

As a key component of the Yangtze River Delta, now an advanced manufacturing and modern services hub, Nanjing started early to develop its outsourcing industry and continues to lead the nation, said Cao Jinsong, spokesman for the city government.

Today 486 companies with a total staff of more than 115,000 people are working in the outsourcing sector in Nanjing.

Despite global economic turmoil, the city's outsourcing business maintained robust growth last year with an increase of 178 percent to $2.21 billion in contract value.

Distinct advantages

Cao quoted Mayor Ji Jianye saying that the number "4567" summarizes Nanjing's advantages in research capacity - the first digits in the city's 53 higher learning institutes, more than 600,000 technicians and experts, 700,000 college and university students, 700 research institutions and about 80 academicians.

The pool of human resources provides a guarantee to healthy and sustainable growth of local outsourcing industry, Cao said.

Different from the traditional resource and labor-intensive processing trade, which focuses on manufacturing based on imported raw materials or assembling imported components, service outsourcing business highlights technology and intellect, Cao said.

"Taking advantage of information and telecommunication, clients send over non-core business and our technological teams deliver solutions at their request, an approach that has high manpower needs," Cao noted.

Nanjing has an ample reservoir of human resources, with some 10,000 information technology (IT) majors out of 700,000 graduates annually, he said.

Currently, around 60 percent of local service outsourcing businesses are in IT, according to Qiu Shaoming, vice-chief of the city's commercial bureau.

More than 45 percent of the province's software developers are in Nanjing.

"We will now move up to higher modes - business process outsourcing and information process outsourcing, which require local companies to continuingly increase competitiveness," Qiu said.

As a growing number of Chinese cities are eyeing outsourcing as a new spot for economic growth, Nanjing faces increasing competition.

"If we can't upgrade ourselves, outsourcing companies from other cities will take our place and even take away the entire cake," spokesman Cao said.

"So we have to keep sharpening our edge to reinforce our leading position," he said.

"Who gets the task done best at the lowest cost obviously has the advantage. Improving the competitiveness of local companies is crucial."

Due to their strong growth, 10 firms in Nanjing were among the top 100 Chinese companies last year, while several ranked among the best 20 Chinese software outsourcing operations.

(China Daily 06/04/2010 page35)