The Hindu Business Line : Aditya Birla Minacs plans rural BPOs

Bangalore, Nov. 4 Aditya Birla Minacs, the BPO subsidiary of Aditya Birla Nuvo Ltd, is planning to set up rural delivery centres to cater to its growing business in the domestic market.

The company proposes to run such new centres in a “hub and spoke” model as part of its Connect India initiative, wherein large centres across the country would act as a hub for services delivery while rural units would be the spokes.

Mr Deepak Patel, CEO, Aditya Birla Minacs, said the first such rural unit would be set up in 90 days. “It is very cost-competitive to run these centres in small towns. Multilingual skills in the rural areas would play an important role in servicing local clients,” he said.

Each large delivery centre or hub would have up to 12 rural BPO units and will cater to a fourth of the volumes. The remaining would be distributed to spokes or the rural units to ensure buffer rationalisation.

The rural units are expected to employ about 100 people each.

The company has large delivery centres in Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Aurangabad and Vadodara.

Aditya Birla Minacs entered the Indian market early this year and has signed several large deals with local clients, including group companies of parent Aditya Birla Nuvo Ltd such as Idea Cellular and Birla SunLife among others. The company is targeting verticals such as insurance, banking, telecom, retail and public sector in the local market from where it earns less than $25 million in revenues, Mr Patel said.

For the September quarter, revenues of Aditya Birla Minacs were down to Rs 386.95 crore from Rs 477.77 crore in the corresponding last quarter. Profit before income-tax stood at Rs 9.71 crore against a loss of Rs 8.40 crore in the corresponding previous quarter. “We have been cash positive every month in the first half of the current fiscal,” Mr Patel said.

The decline in revenues is largely attributed to the impact of global downturn and the company’s strategy of staying away from non-profitable contracts. The company has pruned its exposure to large clients in the auto segment such as General Motors in the aftermath of the auto giant declaring bankruptcy. As a result, revenues from General Motors have come down to less than $70 million a year against $140 million in the previous year.

“We are focusing on profitable deals and getting into high quality revenues,” Mr Patel added.

Related Stories:
Aditya Birla's IT arm renamed

More Stories on : Outsourcing | Rural Development

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page