English and China

I present a portion of the Orientation Speech I prepared for an introductory seminar on BPO business and its productivity potential in China.

Let us begin this section by understanding the one thing that lies below the very foundation of the whole BPO business. We have all heard about the low cost implications of outsourcing and the flexibility it provides to the parent organization. We, however, forget about the single most important factor that set the ball rolling for this development in global business. I, for example, am talking right now in a language that you can barely understand. You are able to understand some of it through the subtitles running below. Let’s assume I set up an office here and you and I start working together. How are we going to understand each other? I would find it very difficult if I wanted to set up my back office here. You, similarly, would find it very difficult to work with me. Why is it so? It is because we can’t communicate. We need something that both of us can work with. We need the same LANGUAGE. This was, and still remains, the single most important factor in any business that goes outside its native market.

Early outsourcers sought new resources due to rising operational and management costs. They discovered that they can find a more cost efficient workforce in other parts of the world. One basic problem that they faced was that not many people around the world spoke or used their business language. This language was mostly English. Many non English businesses, for example Spanish, have found their way in the outsourcing business today; English, however, remains the most used and needed language till this day. This is when locations like India and Philippines came in to picture. People there had a heritage of English and they could use it pretty comfortably in most of the business situations. These places, combining language availability with more cost efficient workforce at the same time, saw a huge inflow of outsourced business in coming years. India, for example, is expected to do a combined business of more than 40 billion US Dollars in this financial year. The business, however, does not see language as a direct contributor all the time. There are a lot of areas which include primarily non language based business. IT services is a good example. The language of IT and developing tools, however, is a vital premise there too. We can see, therefore, that in any business a common language remains a basic and vital ingredient.

Let us consider China as a player in this business. We mentioned cost efficient workforce and a common business language as key ingredients of the outsourcing business. There is no lack of trainable educated individuals here. China has made its mark in almost all the arenas of global and domestic business. The outsourcing business, still, has not kicked off in a major way here. Why is it so? It so happens that English is not a major part of our lives here. We can see people largely flourishing socially and economically in China. This, though, is happening as a result of a highly self sufficient economy that does not depend highly on English speaking nations for much of its development. We, in other words, do not ‘miss’ English in our daily and extended business or personal life here. The picture, however, changes in the case of outsourcing business. It was mentioned earlier that English is the primary language of the outsourcing business as a whole. This lack of international communication standard can, therefore, be seen as a major hurdle in the way of a flourishing outsourcing sector here.