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: is not uncommon to find players in tier II and III cities with less than five seats,” says Gupta.

Gupta says the big BPO companies’ interest in the Indian market has deepened in the last two to three quarters, although he has his own doubts about how these companies will perform when it comes to serving the mass market. Infovision, with revenues of Rs 200 crore, has 23 centres in the country, employing 9,000 people. Of these, around 8,000 are employed for the domestic business.

While V AnandKumar, Wipro BPO’s vice-president for people supply chain and employee branding, feels that one of the reasons for the sudden spurt in the interest level by the top BPO companies for the Indian market is the appreciation in Indian rupee and the realisation by the management that the labour cost arbitrage between the Indian market and the more developed market may not continue for ever.

“In fact, we are seeing a gradual decline in the wage differences especially after the opening up of new BPO markets like Philippines,” AnandKumar says.

But, for the Indian BPO companies serving the international market all this was nothing new. Some analysts had cautioned them about the impeding threats for the Indian BPO industry from cost arbitrage and competition from “low-labour-cost destinations”.

Gartner, in one of its reports in 2005, had said, “Although no single nation poses a threat to India’s dominance, during the past two years, more than 50 countries have emerged to cumulatively threaten its position in the BPO market.”

Gartner estimated that “India will lose roughly 40% of the global offshore BPO marketshare to these emerging global destinations by 2007 (0.7 probability).”

Though it is yet to be estimated how much India has lost in the global offshore BPO market, Nasscom, in its Top 15 ITeS-BPO exporters ranking for 2006-07, has some estimates. According to the industry association, compared to 33.5% growth in FY 07 contributing $31.4 billion, in FY 08, the growth would be around 30% with export revenue of $10.5-11 billion.

Says Kalyan Kar, managing director of Acclaris Business Solutions Pvt Ltd, which does high-end BPO jobs for Fortune 100 companies, “The threats are real. But still it has little impact on the country’s outsourcing export business.”