South Africa: Jobs Grow 30 Percent in Western Cape Call Centres
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
1 October 2008
Posted to the web 1 October 2008
Chris Van Gass
Cape Town
The cost of domestic and international communications was a major barrier to growth, particularly in a sector such as the call centre and business process outsourcing industry, Western Cape's economic development MEC Garth Strachan said yesterday.
Even though the national government had undertaken to deregulate the industry, this had not yet translated into price reductions for an industry which had seen major growth in investment, and a fourfold increase in the number of jobs created since 2003 .
This was an issue both the provincial government and the private sector needed to take up with the national government. It had to ensure the Western Cape region's capability to intensify and sustain its job creation efforts in areas such as call centres and other niche industries that provide back office processing for sectors including insurance, telecommunications and financial services.
Strachan said during the release of an industry survey by CallingtheCape, the province's contact centre and business processing outsourcing (BPO) development agency, and Deloitte, that the economic effect of the sector in the province was estimated at R2,5bn and that it had a much bigger potential. He said employment in the industry had risen from 6500 in 2003 to more than 27000.
More than 30% of this growth in jobs had come from 30 new investment deals to the value of more than R750m, facilitated through CallingtheCape. It included investments from companies like Barclays, Shell, the Dialogue group, Australian technology company iiNet and major US-based global outsourcing com- pany Teletech.
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Strachan said the province had, through its micro-economic development strategy, flagged the BPO as a priority sector and had spent nearly R17m on interventions to promote investment and growth, skills development, as well as SME support. SA was a favoured offshore location for UK companies offering multilingual capabilities to the European market. The UK was also the most common foreign country to which services were provided.
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