Convergence Plus Journal

Convergence Plus Spoke with Mr. Pravin Kumar, CEO, Spanco BPO regarding the growth and development of the company and more. Few excerpts…

Apart from Telecom, Banking and eGovernance segments in India, what are the other segments that Spanco plans to foray into?

Currently, Spanco Group caters to Telecom, BFSI and eGovernance segments. The Telecom business for BPO has reached a level of maturity and BFSI and eGovernance are likely to grow from 20% to 25% more in the coming couple of years. If you look at Spanco BPO, we have always catered to the clients where we have end to end domain knowledge like telecom, Banking and eGovernance.

Thus, we will be focusing only in to those segments where we would have full domain knowledge. Other segments that Spanco plans to further foray are Retail, Power and Insurance. With the Spanco Group’s strong presence and domain knowledge in the power segment, we plan to start BPO activity in this segment within 3 months. For Insurance, we have already started some operations and we are still in the learning stage of it.

What are the various onshore business activities that Spanco BPO has undertaken for the Middle East, the UK and the USA? What is your approach as far as the onshore business is concerned?

In Middle East, we are catering to the clients for Telecom, Banking and e-Governance sector whereas in US we are supporting FI collections space and retail sector. In Qatar and Oman each and every bank and telecom company is our client. In UK, we are catering to 5 clients currently in gaming, telecom and retail industry. Our approach is focused on the complete customer lifecycle management services.

More important than the location are the services and quality of work that is being delivered. Call handling business can be very volatile and prone to cost arbitrage. However, when you focus on contract managed services where domain knowledge is important, you have the upper hand. In customer service business 60 percent of the revenue is from customer retention.

So as a company we look at creating an onshore business ecosystem where we are able to service clients from destinations within that country that allow us to provide best services.

What are the various markets (worldwide) that Spanco BPO is targeting to expand its business? Tell us about your investment and expansion plans.

We already have our presence in US, UK, India, Africa and Middle East. We see Africa as a destination with very high potential. Some African countries are offering incentives to create jobs and develop their BPO industry. In Africa we are one of the first BPO players to create an outsourcing industry.

We have announced our plans to invest about US$ 20 million over the next three years to create 5,000 seat infrastructure employing about 10,000 people across the continent. We plan to start the activity in about seven countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and Tanzania. We already have centers in Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania. Rest of the countries will be operational in coming 3 months.

As of now we want to expand our business in the countries where we have our presence however, if opportunities arise we may look forward to venture in some other countries also. In the next 6 months we will be 12000-13000 people strong in India, 3000 in Africa, 275 in UK and 750 in Middle East.

By the next year we want Africa to be as big as Indian operations in revenue terms. We are in process of hiring 6000 more employees by the year March, 2012 taking the number to 18,000 to cater our expansion plans. We would set up three more centres in India and expand businesses in Africa, and United Kingdom over the next one year.

Spanco, which has onshore as well as offshore operations, is expecting a turnover of Rs 280 crore this fiscal year, up by Rs 80 crore from last year. We plan to double the turnover to Rs 500 crore by next financial year with major businesses coming from Africa and Indian markets.

Spanco would invest around US$ 20 million in Africa alone over the next few months for the setup, while in India we would spend up to US$ 5 million for hiring purposes. We have already zeroed in for Nagpur and we would set up a centre over the next three months.