Outsourcing faces new era of scrutiny

Outsourcing faces new era of scrutiny

LONDON (Reuters) – Outsourcing, Indian-style, is challenged as never before by an erosion in business confidence that makes corporate spending, even to generate quick cost-savings, harder to justify.

“No New Investment” is the order of the day; cost avoidance, the mantra; zero percent, the growth target in the current era of uncertainty.

Software service providers emerged out of the 2000-2002 technology spending bust with sales growing up to 50 percent a year as they won over companies to contract out inefficient operations instead of managing them in-house.

But shocks to the world economy seen over the past 18 months are triggering reassessments of corporate growth expectations, cost considerations and operational accountability. It’s no longer safe to assume that the logic that drove outsourcing in the past will drive it again, once the economy picks up.

Here are reasons why the industry will find it difficult to repeat its past performance in the tough times ahead.

CUTTING BACK ON COST-CUTTING: The paradox at the moment is that spending on services meant to cut costs and save money is itself being squeezed.

Technology Partners International (TPI), a research firm that has tracked the outsourcing industry for 20 years, reported this week that total contract volumes fell 22 percent in the fourth quarter from a year ago.

Just how bad things could get this year is only likely to emerge as corporate customers nail down their 2009 spending plans to vendors in the next two to three months.

“The worst of the IT (information technology) spending slowdown likely remains in front of us as we start the clock on slashed 2009 budgets,” Goldman Sachs warned in a report on the software industry earlier this month.

The conventional wisdom is that companies will eventually need to cost-cut their way out of the economic morass. But as the software services industry has matured over this decade, Goldman analysts say the sector has become more cyclically dependent on overall IT spending, reducing the chances it will be an early winner in any corporate recovery.

Tata Consultancy Services, the largest of the Indian software service providers, estimates that budgets for IT outsourcing will fall between 5 and 20 percent during 2009. Market forecasters predict more declines in store for 2010.

KEY CUSTOMERS IN TROUBLE. One problem is that the $40 billion-a-year industry’s fortunes are heavily linked to the financial sector. Indeed outsourcing started out 30 years ago as a way to help banks automate tangled back-office operations.

But while it grew more diverse in the 1990s, branching into telecom, manufacturing, retail and other industries; banks, brokerages and insurers are still the biggest slice of the market at 20 percent of overall sales, Goldman Sachs estimates.

The finance sector is not just in trouble, it is experiencing a meltdown like no other since the 1970s or perhaps even the 1930s — long before outsourcing itself was invented. And while the credit crisis has left many institutions needing to slash costs, we are seeing a wholesale contraction of the market that will lead to steep reductions in overall demand. Whole parts of the business will disappear and not be replaced.

Moreover, the financial industry’s reliance on governments for bailouts has curtailed the autonomy of bosses. Governments are likely to be dubious should big banks and insurers seek to offshore financial jobs, especially in countries with mounting unemployment. Outsourcers may have to get used to having fewer, and more conservative, financial services customers.