Aditya Birla Minacs to hire 2,000 in 6 months

Aditya Birla Minacs, the BPO arm of the Aditya Birla Nuvo group, is gearing up its India operations, and plans to hire around 2,000 people in the next six months. Earlier this year, it had won a Rs 600-crore (Rs 6 billion) outsourcing services deal.

As part of its strategy to be a $1-billion (Rs 4,700 crore) company in the next four years, it is eyeing the fast-growing telecom and insurance space in the domestic market. For which it has ventured into rural India under its initiative of 'Connect India'. The company's revenue for the year ended March 31 was $360 million (Rs 1,687 crore).

Aditya Birla Minacs is coming up with a hub-and-spoke model that will make the company increase its footprint in Tier-III and -IV cities. Some of the companies that are expanding their reach in rural India are Aegis BPO, Comat Technologies, and SerWizSol (a Tata Enterprise).

It has already set up four centres in Chennai, Baroda, Aurangabad, and Kolkata that would act as hubs for their respective regions. It also plans to set up one centre each in Gujarat, Jharkhand and Maharashtra in the next three to six months.

"India is a very interesting space. With business growth going to the rural areas, this brings in challenges for the service provider as well. For instance, in the telecom segment, the average revenue per user is falling and will come down further, but the servicing has to decline further, creating pressure on centres in tier-I and II cities," said Milind Godbole, President APAC, at Aditya Birla Minacs.

The hub, with headcount in the range of 800-1,00,0 will handle 20-25 per cent of volume. The rest would be distributed among the spokes, which would each have a capacity of 100 seats or slightly more. Godbole further added that the shift from price per FTE call to price per call is already happening. Besides, since the market is shifting to tier-III, and IV, there is an increasing need to cater to regional languages.

But are clients ready for such a shift in delivery? "There has been some apprehension, but then we do have positive feedback as well. The Idea deal is one such instance," added Godbole.

Some of the challenges for the company are training and selecting the locations. "The training for a management staff would take two months but for the rest it would be four to seven months. Besides, we would be taking employees from tier-III and IV cities to the metro for training. This solves the problem of finding people to go and stay in these cities," added Godbole.

With the Indian market growing faster, more and more IT service providers are gearing up their offerings. The domestic BPO market, with a growth rate of 50 per cent over five years, grew faster than the exports market to reach nearly $1.6 billion revenues in the financial year 2008. Though it is smaller than the $11-billion BPO exports market, it is expected to reach $6 billion by 2012, according to a new Ernst and Young study.

The domestic BPO market, hence, presents a huge untapped growth opportunity. Its addressable market opportunity is in the range of $16-19 billion by 2012, with significant business growth coming in from sectors like BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), telecom, media, retail and government sectors.