The Future of Outsourcing to Bangladesh

In the last decade or so, Bangladesh has seen an unprecedented growth in its BPO industry. In 2007, what started as mostly small contact centers and freelancers working in outsourcing platforms such as Upwork now became, as of 2017-18 fiscal year, an industry which has a revenue of approximately 250 million dollar per year, with numerous fast growing BPO firms such as ASL BPO, Virtuworx, FieldNation and ServicEngineBPO each earning hundreds of thousands of dollar annually.

Source: ICT Ministry and BASIS

So what is the reason for the growth of the outsourcing sector in Bangladesh? Below are some of the main reasons as follows:

1) ​​Comparatively lower costs of skilled labor: Skilled labor ​​costs in Bangladesh is much lower​​ than countries such as India, Philippines and China. Such that businesses that have outsourced to Bangladesh have seen a further decrease in their costs in comparison to when they had outsourced to countries such as India, China or Philippines.

2) Quality Service: The service quality that clients have gotten from Bangladeshi Outsourcing firms have been in the same level and even better in some cases than from outsourcing companies in competing countries. This along with substantial lower costs have inclined many businesses to hire from Bangladesh than from others.

3) Availability of skilled labor: Approximately 2 lac students graduates from University every year. Many turn to the outsourcing sector to earn money due to the possibilities of better opportunities. Currently, more than 650,000 Bangladeshi are registered as freelan

cers in Upwork alone, and their are more than 1,500 outsourcing firms present in the country. These numbers are rapidly increasing and what this means is that foreign businesses are becoming more familiar with Bangladesh as being an outsourcing hub to hire from.

Recent research has shown that the majority of the revenue from outsourcing is from Software development and BPO work. While others included Development of mobile applications, web services, etc.

Source: BASIS and Lightcastle Research​​

Expectations from Bangladesh's Outsourcing/BPO Industry in 2018-2019: ​

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1) The Industry will continue to grow at its current rate with more clients inclining to hire from Bangladesh.

2) Due to automation that is forecasted to take a lot of outsourcing jobs, there will be a paradigm shift in the demand of higher end skills that cannot be automated such as software development, online marketing and mobile application development.

3) Business Process Outsourcing and Contact Centers will produce the most jobs in the sector.

Zayed Ahmed is the Founder and CEO of ASL BPO, a startup BPO firm that provides Outsourcing Solutions to businesses world wide. To know more about him and the firm go to http://www.aslpreservationsolutions.com/