Ancient Land of Pharaohs Has A High-Tech Future?

Silicon.com -- Egypt is making a pitch to be the next offshore outsourcing hot-spot, claiming that its foreign language skills and low labour costs put the country in a strong position to compete with India and eastern Europe.

AT Kearney recently ranked Egypt number 12 in a list of top offshore outsourcing destinations and while the country's share of the offshore call-centre market is still very small, analyst Datamonitor predicts it will grow by 52% over the next 12 months.

Egypt's leading call center company Xceed has a 1,200 seat operation at a new government-subsidised high-tech Smart Village just outside Cairo where salaries for staff working on offshore accounts range from around $400 to $500 per month.

The company, whose customers include General Motors, Microsoft and Oracle, also has no problem picking the best candidates - with 18,000 applications received for each position.
Adel Danish, chairman and CEO of Xceed, speaking to silicon.com at the company's Egypt headquarters this week said the country is ideally situated to be a near-shore outsourcing destination for European companies.

He said: "Egypt can be for Europe what India is to the US."