India's outsourcing bubble is bursting

Bangalore, India--Once a high-flying tech hub, Bangalore is seeing more sober days in the wake of the credit crisis. For tech employees, jobs no longer come with a lifetime guarantee. It looks like the global economic turmoil and the dramatic Wall Street meltdown is beginning to hit Bangalore.


Until recently, in India's outsourcing hub it used to be one big Googlefest, with all the pampering and cosseting that employees enjoy at the company's Googleplex headquarters in Silicon Valley. I don't know what the latest from Googleplex is. But in Bangalore, it sure looks like the party is slowing down.

The first sign is in real estate. In a city where residential communities like Silver Manor, Golden Enclave and Platinum City sprouted to house thousands of young, upwardly mobile technology workers, instead of 200 million-rupee homes, developers are now beginning to market 2 million-rupee condominiums.

Departmental stores sport 'sale' signs every other week as credit-card-happy tech workers are cooling off consumption. In India's top management schools, including the Bangalore branch of the Indian Institute of Management, technology outsourcing firms, multinationals and Wall Street banks used to slug it out for Day Zero spots during Placement Week. For students in the graduating class, that exercise is months away. But the schools are already planning to offset an expected slowdown in placements by inviting more companies.

The collapse of top US financial firms will cause a dramatic slowdown in hiring among outsourcing companies. The banking, financial services and insurance sectors account for 40 per cent of revenues for India's $52 billion outsourcing industry (as of 2007-2008). Firms such as now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers and bought-out Merrill Lynch were big customers and provided millions of dollars worth of lucrative contracts to Indian technology services companies.
Consequently, in the past home-grown Indian outsourcing companies grew by impressive numbers. Infosys and Wipro, the big two employers in Bangalore, were each hiring 10,000 employees or more during recent years. Such spectacular ramp-ups are unlikely to recur any time soon. One large call centre with European and US customers is now refusing to hire anybody that does not stay within a five-mile radius of their centers: the costs are just too high.