When the city of Beijing held a conference, on April 24,on service outsourcing and the call center business in southwest China, it saw more than 3–billion-yuan ($480 million) worth of contracts involving call centers, e-business and cross-border trade settlements signed.
Liu Wenxin told the conference that the outsourcing and call center business has seen a real boom in Guiyang and that, by the end of 2014, its call center business had 22,000 agents and that the figure is expected to reach 72,000 by the end of this year and, hopefully, 300,000 by the end of 2020. By then, it should have more than 100 companies providing as many as 700,000 jobs.
Liu went on to say there are many more call centers expected to open soon, including a Guanshanhu Big Data Center and Guiyang International Call Center.
In commenting on this, the head of the National Human Resource Institute for Service Outsourcing, Cao Mingyuan, said, "The Internet boom has brought Guizhou opportunities and even though it's a remote province, that geographical disadvantage is trivial in the Internet age. And Guizhou's environment, policies, support facilities and human resources are all good for the service outsourcing and call center business."
In seconding this, Yu Yan, the deputy director of Beijing's Investment Promotion Bureau, said, "Beijing and Guiyang's cooperation in service outsourcing and call centers is a winning move and since Beijing has technology, capital, and human resources while Guiyang has a good environment and resources, which Beijing lacks. And, since we're an organization that promotes investment, we'll encourage more Beijing companies to invest in Guiyang."
There are at least 95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies that have call centers, and, if we look at the United States, which has a population of 315 million, at least 7 million people are involved in the call center business. Meanwhile, in China, which has 1.5 billion people, there are only 3 million people in the call center industry, so it clearly has a lot of room to grow.
