ICT-BPO Opportunities in Mauritius

Mauritius, the African island with a GDP growth of 3.2% (2012) and a population of 1.3 mn is the next big investment destination for ICT-BPO sector. The economy of Mauritius is innovation driven and by 2020 it is expected to be high income economy. The ICT-BPO sector together contributes 6.5% to the total GDP, and by 2015 it is expected to reach 8%. This indicates that the industry is remarkably dynamic, complex, and competitive. The ICT-BPO sector in Mauritius has eventually evolved and is growing rapidly.

Mauritius as a diversified market

It was in 1990s when Mauritius emerged as a feasible offshore destination for the ICT-BPO sector. Mauritius has a diversified market for the export of ICT-BPO activities with France, Benelux, Overseas French Departments and the UK being among the top five markets. It encouraged the early entrants to set up transactional voice-based services in the country. During 2001-2003 the adoption of ICT-BPO sector increased and the service providers increased their focus on process and quality. There was a visible shift towards ‘judgement-based' services from ‘rule-based' services. Year 2003 onwards the ICT-BPO sector has been growing rapidly, since there were a lot of new entrants and players delivered high order work with similar scale levels and market consolidation by mergers and acquisitions.

The ICT/BPO industry has generated some 17,700 jobs and employment is projected to reach 30,000 by 2014. Mauritius offers bilingual, cost-effective pool of talent. Mauritius still suffers from a long response time in building up the human capital required, including the major transformation needed to re-skill workers in the traditional agricultural industry for the emerging sectors. Number of initiatives have been put in place for creating a pool of world-class BPO professionals.

Service providers and captives have well-established operations in Mauritius. Some of the global service providers and captives present in Mauritius are Accenture, Hinduja, Infosys, Microsoft, Thomson Digital, etc, (service providers) and AXA, Huawei, Deutsche Bank, TNT, Orange, Fidelity etc. Some of the regional service providers of Mauritius include Airmate, Apollo, CSS Corp, Euro CRM, GLS, Pro Contact, etc.

Investment Opportunities

Mauritius has investment opportunities in BPO voice, BPO non-voice, ITO, business intelligence & consultancy, KPO and RnD offshoring. Mauritius has a bilingual, cost-effective pool of talent. The number of graduates is increasing. Over 50% of graduates are from Engineering, Business Administration and Science discipline. The Mauritians are proficient in English and French. They have affinity for western, Indian, Chinese, and African cultures. Moreover, they are cost effective and highly trainable.

Mauritius has a reliable and redundant ICT infrastructure. It has a high-capacity undersea fiber-optic network (SAFE and LION) linking Africa to Asia and Europe via Middle East. Fiber optics is expected to bring cost of international bandwidth further down. New telecom operators have been given licenses to pass on benefits to consumers. Well-developed digital network infrastructure and high-bandwidth international leased lines through the SAFE and the LION cables provide resiliency, route diversity, and capacity to drive international connectivity requirements.