Aditya Birla BPO to expand headcount to 1,000 in 5 months

Aditya Birla Minacs, a BPO venture of the Aditya Birla Group, has drawn up huge expansion plans in Kolkata. The company, which soft-launched its operations in the city in March and employs 450 people, will expand its headcount to 1,000 over the next five months.

And not just that. Aditya Birla Minacs, which figures among India’s top 10 BPOs, is preparing a business plan which will see its headcount in Kolkata growing to nearly 5,000 people. This includes setting up a string of BPO facilities across the city as well as some 6-to-10 centres in some of the smaller towns in the state. It also plans to add more verticals in Kolkata from its present focus on telecoms.

The company’s top brass has recently made a presentation of its expansion plans in West Bengal to the state IT department. "The company is quite bullish about Kolkata and plans to set up one of their largest operations here," said the West Bengal IT secretary, Mr Siddharth.

Confirming the development, Aditya Birla Minacs CEO Deepak Patel said the company is looking at the hub-and-spoke model to expand its operations in West Bengal.

"We plan to have the hub facility in Kolkata which will support a number of smaller BPO centres in smaller towns. The small town facilities will support regional language BPO activities. While we will add some 550-odd people by March 2010, eventually our Kolkata operations will accommodate up to 4,000-5,000 people," Mr Patel told ET.

Aditya Birla Minacs’ Kolkata facility undertakes voice-based BPO activities for the group’s telecom venture, Idea Cellular. "Within the telecom vertical, we will also foray into non-voice areas like finance and accounting in Kolkata. This includes more such projects from Idea Cellular. We may also undertake BPO projects for other group companies out of Kolkata," said Mr Patel.

The company is also bullish about allocating projects from some of its others clients into Kolkata. "We will soon expand the scope of our Kolkata operations into newer verticals like banking, insurance and financial services (BFSI), health, public sector and manufacturing," Mr Patel said.

Incidentally, Aditya Birla Minacs believes in leasing out space for its facilities. It has just taken some additional space on lease in the city’s tech hub at Salt Lake Sector V. "We are currently in the process of identifying more locations where we can set up our facilities. We are particularly attracted by the huge talent pool available in the state," said Mr Patel.

While Aditya Birla Nuvo holds 88.28% in Aditya Birla Minacs, the balance 11.72% is owned by Canadian private investment firm ReichmannHauer Capital Partners. The company employs some 6,000 people out of Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Aurangabad, Baroda and Kolkata. Another 6,000-odd people are employed in overseas facilities spread over the US, Canada, Europe and Philippines.