A.T. Kearney has released its 2017 Global Services Location Index (GSLI), a study that analyzes and tracks the contours of the offshoring landscape in 55 countries across three major categories: financial attractiveness, people skills and availability, and business environment.

The GSLI brings rigor to companies’ decisions about where to locate offshore operations and sheds light on their complex and shifting choices, particularly in the business process outsourcing (BPO) arena.

According to the study, Vietnam jumped five spots to sixth on the list. 

India, China, and Malaysia are once again the top-ranked offshoring destinations, with India pulling way ahead of all other countries. 

Indonesia and Brazil swapped fourth and fifth places.

“Though the top three countries have remained in the same order every year since the study’s inception in 2004, we have begun to see a widening gap between first-ranked India and all the rest, starting with a significantly larger lead over the country ranked second, China,” said Mr. Arjun Sethi, Partner and Global Head of A.T. Kearney’s Digital Transformation Practice and co-author of the study. 

“But we are now far enough into the trend towards automation to see that substantial job loss is inevitable in all countries involved in the BPO industry, as hundreds of thousands of low-skilled and repetitive jobs are replaced by automation.”

GSLI is the premier ranking of location amenability for companies looking to relocate functions such as financial services, accounting, and customer service, and this year’s study also takes a broader view of the likely implications of automation in several types of economies around the world.

A.T. Kearney is a leading global management consulting firm with offices in more than 40 countries. Since 1926, it has been a trusted advisor to the world’s foremost organizations. 

A.T. Kearney is a partner-owned firm, committed to helping clients achieve immediate impact and growing advantage in their most mission-critical issues.

Now in its eighth edition since 2004, the 2017 GSLI helps companies make decisions about where to locate their offshore operations and sheds light on their complex and shifting choices. 

The 55 countries in the 2017 index were selected based on corporate input, current remote services activity, and government initiatives to promote the sector. 

Each country is evaluated against 38 measurements to assess its financial attractiveness, people skills and availability, and business environment.

The eighth edition of the GSLI, entitled “The Widening Impact of Automation”, chronicles the growing threat to BPO jobs in both developed and developing economies - estimating that 1 million jobs are at risk in just four countries - and sheds light on the gap this is creating with the rest of the global outsourcing market. 

The study’s findings reveal a far bigger change in global employment stability than in shifts in the country rankings. 

In fact, the top-ranking countries have undergone few changes in position since the 2016 GSLI.

Automation is putting more than a million point of sale (POS) jobs at risk in the next five years in four countries alone: the US, Poland, India, and the Philippines.

VN Economic Times