Sourcing Innovation: Is Egypt Trying to Make BRICE out of BRIC?

Sourcing Innovation: Is Egypt Trying to Make BRICE out of BRIC?


Late last year, I noted how "Made in China", for a growing number of operations, is now "Made in Egypt" as even China is adopting outsourcing. According to a recent Industry Week article, over 950 Chinese companies have set up operations in Egyptian free zones and made an investment of about 300 Million to take advantage of cheap labor, investment incentives, and unrestricted exports.

But an even bigger story, as pointed out in a recent paper in Education and the MBA in the outsourcing sector by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary of the Egypt ITIDA, is probably the imminent rise of IT Outsourcing In Egypt, which, despite only having 77 Million people to India's 1.1 Billion, has a large annual graduating class of 330 Thousand students, with 63 Thousand graduating in commerce, 17 Thousand graduating in Engineering, and 14 Thousand graduating with science degrees. Within this pool, you find a large number of technologically skilled, achievement-focused, and multi-lingual students (who also speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or Dutch) suited to the IT services sector. Furthermore, the government is funding a number of workforce development initiatives (which it also initiated) that is currently contributing 6,000 to 8,000 graduates for the IT-BPO industry annually, with plans to scale the efforts until Egypt is producing 40,000 graduates suitable for IT-BPO by 2015.