India's largest IT company outsources to women in Saudi Arabia
Forget outsourcing to India. India’s largest IT company is now
planning to outsource to Saudi Arabia, debuting its first
“all-female services center” in Riyadh yesterday, the Financial
Times
reports.
Tata Consultancy Services, which was founded in 1968 in Mumbai and
is now valued at almost US $64 billion, will open the center in
spring 2014, in partnership with General Electric, which will join
as a client along with Saudi Aramco.
With the goal of eventually employing 3,000 women, the center will
launch with an initial staff of 400, who will work in human
resources and finance (contrary to what you might imagine, those in
need of IT tech support will not now hear the voice of a
Saudi woman; a woman-staffed call center might violate conservative
norms).
The Indian IT company's motivation for entering the Saudi market is
simply noted as a plan to tap the Kingdom’s underemployed talent
pool.
“In India, there has been huge opportunity for our industry to
liberate underused talent and, while Saudi isn’t on the same scale,
there is still a big opportunity to help people, especially women,
find good professional jobs,” Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the chief
executive of TCS,
told the FT.
Chandrasekaran also explained that he doesn’t expect criticism
about other women’s employment efforts to chase Tata, because the
platform has the support of the Saudi government.
This news comes on the heels of Glowork’s
recent, somewhat surprising accquisition for $16 million.
Glowork, an online platform that connects women in Saudi Arabia to
part-time and full-time jobs, is also supported by the Saudi
government and counts the Saudi Ministry of Labor as its primary
client.
Hiring women in Saudi can be a bit of a racket, Glowork founder
Khalid Alkhudair explained when discussing
the company’s acquisition; some businesses hire women simply to
reach Saudization goals, without actually offering real jobs. As it
is, the government is incentivized to support employment in any
form, having spent $10 billion on unemployment last year.
At Tata, which has grown to over $11 billion in yearly revenues,
partly thanks to selling Y2K conversion software in the 90s, these
women- whether Saudi or expatriate- will be a small percentage of a
near-300,000 employee base, but they will certainly have real
jobs.
Tata is hardly the first Indian IT company to seek out talent in
the Arab world (remember
the story of Aspire.jo?), but its plan to outsource to women in
Saudi Arabia marks a tidal shift in the Middle East.