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NYSE-listed BPO player WNS said it hopes to establish centres in two new tier-2/-3 locations next fiscal.
The company is evaluating potential sites in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, and would take a final call based on factors such as availability of manpower, infrastructure, benefits offered by the State Governments, and also its own ability to leverage ‘first mover advantage' in these locations.
The company is keen to provide BPO services to the domestic market (it is yet to sign up the first local mandate.); the new locations will focus on serving both domestic and international customers. The two proposed locations will start with 300-500 capacity, and the company will scale it to 1,500 over a period of time, WNS Group Chief Executive Officer Mr Keshav Murugesh told Business Line .
In talks with States
“Our teams are visiting the locations which have been shortlisted, and are talking to the State Government and other local authorities. We will take a decision by next fiscal,” he said, but did not divulge the locations.
As far as WNS' tier-2/-3 strategy is concerned, the company already has a centre in Nashik, with 1,200 professionals. “Currently, it serves international clients, but once we start our domestic market operations, we will leverage this centre for local clients too. We will also leverage an existing tier-1 location for domestic operations,” he said.
Typically, the cost of operations in smaller cities works out to 15 per cent lower than a similar set up in tier-1 location. “This would include wage cost, the running cost, overall cost of attrition among other heads,” he said.
At present, WNS has centres in locations such as Gurgaon, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and Bangalore, besides Nashik; it employs over 18,000 employees in India.
Healthy deal pipeline
WNS, which counts British Airways and Aviva amongst its large customers, said despite the overall sluggishness in the industry, the company continues to have a healthy deal pipeline. The deals that WNS was pursuing a few quarters back are now near finalisation, he said.
“We feel that a lot of the demand we see is result of recent measures we have taken. These include our new verticalised approach (the BPO operations are now structured in six key verticals – banking, healthcare, insurance, travel, retail, and logistics and shipping.), our initiative to put more sales people on ground, and discussing business ideas with clients and not just playing on cost reduction in deals,” he points out.
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