Tallying the headlines from December 13-19, the most featured company in outsourcing news was Infosys (NasdaqGS: INFY).  The company has appeared back to back in news bits and clips all over the world and it seems like the company is revving up their strategies for the coming new year.

With the United States market still in slump, businesses project difficulties in profit increase in the next 7 years. Job cuts continue in the US and the rate of job creation of 25 per year is not sufficient to offset job losses in the next 5 years. On the other side of the world, Indian outsourcing firms show an opposite trend. Global IT service providers such as Infosys which provides technical consulting, design and development of business solutions have been aggressively increasing their workforce. Last week, the company reported that in the second quarter it has hired 6,069 people offsetting the 4,521 employees it laid off in the same quarter. Tata Consultancy Service is also bullishly hiring with plans of hiring 25,000 people worldwide for this year 2009 and 90% coming from India. Also part of the bandwagon is Wipro Technologies. In October 15 Wipro CEO Azim Premji said that the company is planning to hire about 500 local employees for a new service centre by Jun 2010. Manpower India Director Cherian Kuruvila also highlighted this hiring trend by Indian outsourcing firms saying, “Companies are expected to build a talent pool for upcoming projects as green shoots are visible”.

Offshoring helped firms stay afloat during the economic downturn by keeping costs within reach until such time the markets improve. Now that the world economy shows signs of recovery, the BPO industry should fear not on losing clients. As clients see them, now more than ever, as a partner.

Reading the Indian mainstream news yesterday about India Inc.’s strategy to expand operations in Eastern Europe and hire multilinguals to serve the European finance and accounting sector does not surprise me anymore. In my April article, I talked about how Europe is becoming more comfortable with outsourcing not just to its neighboring countries but also to Asia particularly to the Philippines. The following month, I wrote an article on Philippine Outsourcing re-focusing its efforts to the European market instead in anticipation of US political and trade condition changes.