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Innovative
Agreement with the Private Sector to Repatriate Argentine
Professionals
On March 21, 2007 an innovative
agreement to repatriate Argentine professional citizens
living in other countries was signed between the Ministry
of Foreign Relations, International Trade and Worship of
Argentina and representatives from the six Argentine firms
TECHINT, IBM, SIDERAR, SIDERCA, CORE and TECPETROL, which
will be promoting their offers of employment through the
Argentine Consulates around the world. These agreements
will enable the Argentine companies to count on Argentine
professionals and technicians in other countries.
The agreement allows the
Ministry of Science and Technology to broaden the access
to their widely known program “RAICES”, developed in collaboration
with the Consular Affairs Division of the Foreign Relations
Ministry which through the same program addresses the interests
of Argentine émigrés (a new concept for Argentine
society that has been historically a recipient of immigrants)
and to improve the realization of one of the Ministry’s
very own objectives. This is a great achievement of a joint
effort between the public and the private sector, which
initially counts with the six previously mentioned firms,
but hopes in the near future to enlist many more companies
that will promote their offers of employment to professionals
and technicians around the world through Argentina’s Consulates.
News
Update on Argentine Software Industry.
Argentina's
software and IT sector has the potential to represent 3%
of the country's gross domestic product compared to the
current level of 0.7%
Thursday,
June 24, 2004. (BNamericas.com).
Argentina's
software and IT sector has the potential to represent 3%
of the country's gross domestic product compared to the
current level of 0.7%, according to the industry chamber
Cessi at the start of the Ceiti 2004 congress on Thursday
(June 24).
"It's a good moment now for exporting software and
technology because exchange rate differences have cut the
cost of development," Buenos Aires Software commercial
manager Alejandro Guarnieri told BNamericas. The Cessi event
is useful for demonstrating the maturity of Argentine solutions
and examining which markets have the best potential for
growth, he added.
Although Cessi and the government are about to embark on
a mission to China and have done much to court interest
from North America and Europe, the event is very much a
local affair. "This event is not to attract overseas
business, it is to show off the state of the technology
industry more than the technology itself and to discuss
the main issues which should be addressed the industry to
grow," Cessi president Carlos Pallotti told BNamericas.
"That's why we have brought together actors from various
sectors, such as government, banking and the universities.
We aim to create an environment which exposes the synergies
between buyers, sellers and developers. There will be a
series of announcements about financing and incentive plans,"
he said. The first of these was a 1.5mn-peso (US$512,000)
financing program offered by the Buenos Aires state government.
The program will cover 50% of the winning candidate's development
costs up to a maximum of 50,000 pesos each, said Eduardo
Epsteyn, tourism and sustainable development secretary at
the Buenos Aires metropolitan government. The amount offered
is much greater than last year, in recognition of the value
of the software sector for improving other local industries.
Pallotti called on the government to provide financial support
or incentives for software buyers rather than direct financing
for the developers themselves. He also stressed the advantages
of easing tax conditions because if developers are able
to grow freely they will employ more well-paid people, who
will then contribute to state coffers through consumerism.
In the last year, the number of people employed by Argentina's
software sector has doubled to reach 6,000. Software exports
themselves grew 45% over the last year, according to Cessi's
figures. The government believes exports are now doubling
and it aims to maintain that rate, federal government trade
secretary Martin Redrado said. He told developers the government's
aim was to draft lasting policies which would benefit the
sector well beyond the current administration. Local IT
academic Hugo Solnik, also CEO of security solutions developer
Firmas Digitales, criticized the government's and private
sector's track record so far, referring to low pay for research
and development teams, which has led to migration of local
talent. However, the present administration is doing much
more than its predecessors, Solnik told BNamericas, praising
the selection of Redrado as trade secretary. The government
can also help by guiding developers towards CMM certification,
which would make local products more attractive overseas,
he told the conference. During the recent boom in international
contracts for Argentine firms, there has been an attitude
of "every man for himself, so the government and the
private sector should now centralize and coordinate support
for the sector, Scolnik said, adding that the biggest limiting
factor is lack of capital.
Source: Business News America
By Phil Anderson
Argentina's
software and IT chamber Cessi (Cámara de Empresas
de Software y Servicios Informáticos - Software and
Information Service Company Chamber) expects business between
Chinese and Argentine tech firms to grow to US$20mn over
the next five years.
Wednesday,
June 16, 2004. (BNamericas.com).
Argentina's
software and IT chamber Cessi expects business between Chinese
and Argentine tech firms to grow to US$20mn over the next
five years, Cessi president Carlos Pallotti told BNamericas.
As a result of talks over the last 18 months, the two countries
have already established 25 projects involving 27 Argentine
firms. One such project involves a consortium of Argentine
firms providing health service solutions.
Argentine President Néstor Kirchner is scheduled
to visit China the week after next to sign an agreement
on technological cooperation and will be accompanied by
representatives of 13 Argentine IT firms. Kirchner's visit
is the culmination of negotiations which included four Cessi
missions to China, including Argentina Technology days in
Beijing and Shanghai. About 90 days after the agreement
is signed, Cessi will open a promotional office in China
and the Chinese technology institute ICT will open one in
Argentina before year-end.
Exports to China are just beginning and Argentine IT exports
are concentrated today mainly on Spain, the US, Mexico,
Brazil and Chile. Pallotti estimated these markets account
for total Argentine tech exports of about US$10mn a year.
Cessi considers Canada, Italy, the UK, Israel and China
as target markets, although Spain, the US, Mexico, Brazil
and Chile will always be the main export markets.
Source: Business News America
By Phil Anderson
Is Buenos Aires the Next Bangalore?
Programming wages in Argentina are $11 an hour; 15% less
than in India.
By Carolyn Whelan
Where does an Indian outsourcing company go when it wants
to outsource? These days, it's likely to be Buenos Aires.
Believe it or not, software programming wages there are
less than in Bangalore; about $11 an hour, 15% lower, on
average, than in India's high-tech capital. The same goes
for call-center salaries, which are about $1 an hour. The
reason: Argentina's 2002 currency collapse caused wages
to plummet by two-thirds. Now that crisis, which nearly
wrecked the country's economy, is offering a silver lining.
In early July, Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest
software exporter, formed a joint venture with Datco, an
Argentine IT firm, to pool 200 people in Buenos Aires and
elsewhere in Latin America to service multinational clients.
"Argentina is a great source of engineering talent
with attractive costs," says Mario Tucci, a vice president
of TCS IberoAmerica, who oversees 380 consultants in Uruguay,
Mexico, Brazil, and Spain. Adds Fernando Negro, software
and solutions manager at Datco: "With Tata's scale
and methodology, we can grow our local and global business."
TCS isn't the only software company piling into Argentina.
PeopleSoft Argentina added a lab in Buenos Aires last year
to tweak software headed to Asia and Russia, and it plans
to double the staff there to 50 this year. Motorola added
80 employees at its cellphone-software factory in Cordoba.
And Oracle has beefed up its eStudio in Buenos Aires by
75 people in recent months. Overall, Argentina's IT-outsourcing
revenue is expected to more than triple, to $445 million
by 2008, up from $132 million last year, according to IDC,
a technology consultancy. By then, in Latin America, it
will lag behind only Brazil's $1.7 billion and Mexico's
$816 million markets, but its expected annual growth rate
of 28% is by far the fastest in the region. Argentina also
far outpaces its peers in projected call-center growth.
Today's 2,800 offshore-agent positions -desks where staff
take or make calls- are pegged to triple, to 10,000, by
2008, according to IDC. "Argentina is the world's fastest-growing
offshore call-center market of a comparable size,"
says Mark Best, an analyst at market research firm Datamonitor.
Big call-center names in Buenos Aires include EDS, TeleTech,
and Teleperformance.
The latter's staff tops 1,200 -all of them added since 2002-
who mostly serve U.S. and European customers, in both English
and Spanish. Among the companies they handle calls for are
Microsoft and Motorola.
AOL Latin America recently moved its Puerto Rican and Mexican
call centers to Argentina, from where it now serves all
three countries. It also answers online billing queries
from AOL Germany customers, in German. "Our call center
in Argentina performed better than Mexico's at responding
to technical queries, and in other languages," says
Monique Skruzny, a vice president at AOL Latin America.
"There's an abundance of multilinguals here."
In the long run, Argentina's offshoring sweet spot may be
in multilingual call centers, as it faces off against China,
Hungary, and the Philippines in the fight for such jobs.
Argentina is said to have access to more multilingual people
than any other country in Latin America. Humberto Pato Vinuesa,
the general manager of Atento Argentina, a Buenos Aires
call center that employs 3,000 people -many of them college
students or recent graduates- reckons that one of every
three job applicants for bilingual positions in Argentina
is actually bilingual, compared with one in 1,000 in India.
Companies such as Bank of America are targeting U.S. Hispanics
for mortgages and credit cards. And having truly fluent
bilinguals allows call-center companies to target households
in, say, Miami with one call. "We want to serve the
U.S.'s 40 million Hispanics; that's more than Spain,"
says Vinuesa. "With up to 30,000 bilingual people around
Buenos Aires, we are unstoppable."
(Isued on July 26 2004, copyright Fortune International.)
Strategies
for Developing China’s Software Industry.
The
software industry is deemed an ideal target for a developing
country to integrate into the world information and communications
technology (ICT) market.
On
the one hand the industry is labor intensive, and the developing
countries have a large labor surplus; on the other hand,
it is a worldwide trend for developed countries to outsource
a vast amount of low-end, software-related tasks to the
low-cost countries and regions, which ªts into some
developing countries’ caliber nicely. India has often been
cited as the role model for a developing country to tap
into the world software market for its continuous success
in the software export sector. In comparison, China’s software
industry is still negligible in the world despite its sustained
high economic growth rate since the economic reform took
off in the late 1970s. This paper aims at examining strategies
for developing China’s software industry.
We
use India as a reference because of the similarities of
the two countries’ stages of economic development and the
clear divergence in their ICT structures and development
paths. Although the language barrier has often been singled
out as the major obstacle for China’s software exports,
we believe the major reasons for its underdevelopment can
be ascribed to the following factors. On the national level,
the government attention has been skewed toward the hardware
sector in the ICT industry, and there is no clear national
vision for the strategic direction for the software industry.
On the industry and ªrm level, software development
has been regarded as the art of individual creativity rather
than an engineering process. As a result, the importance
of quality and standards, the two important critical factors
in software development, have been largely neglected. Perhaps
an even more fundamental factor lies in the deeply rooted
notion that software is an attachment to the hardware and
should be a free product. The lack of intellectual property
rights protection on the government side also contributes
to the low spending on software, which further hinders software
ªrms’ incentives to innovate. Extending Heeks’s model
of strategic positioning for developing country software
enterprises, we conclude that rather than following in the
footsteps of India to promote export, China should focus
on its domestic software services market in the near term
and pursue a more balanced development strategy in the long
run. Rather than asking the question of whether China can
become a major competitor like India in the world software
market, we propose that there are rich opportunities for
collaboration between China and world software superpowers,
including India.
Alliances
between Chinese and foreign software ªrms will help
both sides gain beneªt from becoming cocompetitors
in niche markets of mutual beneªt. Cooperation with
these international ªrms will also naturally open up
foreign markets for the Chinese software ªrms.
Mingzhi
Li, Ming Gao, limzh@em.tsinghua.edu.cn, gaom@em.tsinghua.edu.cn,
School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China.
WITSA
Meetings in South Africa, Sept. 26-30, 2004
At our most
recent WITSA meeting in Athens, it was agreed that the next
WITSA Steering Committee and Public Policy meetings will
take place in South Africa at Bakubung and Sandton (in the
vicinity of Johannesburg) from September 26 to 30.
Besides
the WITSA meetings, the program may feature golf, a balloon
or elephant safari, game drive, casino, and other activities.
An agenda and meeting documents will be available soon.
A tentative proposed draft public policy program will include,
in particular, the following important issues:
- VOIP with experts (also
South African telecom minister).
- Cyber security (expect
to draft paper for review and discussion).
- Internet Governance (likely
another paper in advance of pre WSIS meetings).
- E-Government (survey
results).
Our local host in South
Africa is Mr. Adrian Schofield, President of Information
Industry South Africa (www.informationindustry.org.za).
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