Look forward to China outsourcing services

Owing to increasing requirement for offshore IT outsourcing services in the near future; companies in countries such as India, Ireland and the Philippines will meet the trouble of limited outsourcing resources in more established markets for IT services. To bridge this gap, companies are already beginning to pay attention to China's vast quantities of skilled IT workers, even though China isn't expected to become a mature outsourcing service supplier until 2007, at the earliest. There are now 200,000 IT workers in China dedicating to the software outsourcing industry, with an additional 50,000 adding to the workforce each year. Chinese IT workforce, including software engineers and project managers, is also very cheaper than that of US. they only earn about 1/6 of the salaries paid in the U.S. In addition, a lot of Chinese IT professionals have some experience working abroad. But there's more to outsourcing than finding experienced software engineers willing to work for less. Chinese IT professionals are still not good at language ability and cultural compatibility. In addition, most Chinese project managers fall short in experience, and many experienced professionals with English proficiency have went abroad for high-paid jobs. Due to relatively poor language skills most of these workers are lack of opportunities abroad and return to China without highly placed business contacts or valuable management experience. Another challenge that China faces in its mission to become an international IT outsourcing center is its strong domestic economy.

China has over100,000 large corporations and over 10 million small and midsize companies. With so many opportunities in their domestic market, smaller Chinese software outsourcing companies are more likely to provide services to domestic companies while the largest ones have to look abroad for opportunities. Though China has a growing telecommunication infrastructure, it has not spent as much in its telecommunication infrastructure as its counterparts. It is figured out that China invested US$5.9 billion in its telecommunication infrastructure from 1995 to 1999, just slightly more than the Philippines which spent $5.1 billion. Fortunately, China's government has taken steps to address this problem. Despite this hindrance, experts also forecasts that China will become one of the top three countries for overseas IT outsourcing between 2007 and 2010. Companies should map out their offshore outsourcing strategies to utilize China's emerging strength as an outsourcing center, including looking for ways to make use of the country's current software outsourcing priorities.