The global services landscape experienced high growth in 2018 in terms of overall market activity for new center setups. Headcount growth was slower than last year owing to advances in automation capabilities by offshore entities, a talent shortage for new-age technologies, increased onshoring by enterprises, and weakening financial sentiment across the world.

At the same time, there was a marginal shift in growth from offshore to nearshore locations, primarily driven by enterprise and service provider initiatives to rebalance and optimize their existing locations portfolios. While Asia Pacific continues to dominate the global services space, Nearshore Europe grew significantly in digital services delivery. At an overall level, engineering/R&D and IT services continue to dominate the global services industry.

The Global Locations Annual Report 2019 describes the nuances of the global services locations landscape and interprets locations-related developments and trends to help in locations portfolio strategy design. It presents insights on market size and growth and global services exports by region and country, and offers an update of locations activity by region and country and trends affecting global locations (changes in the investment environment, key global developments, and changes in exposure to various risks). It also provides an industry-leading comparison and analysis of key changes in maturity, arbitrage, stability, and potential of global delivery locations/cities through our PEAK Matrix™.

Contents:

This report has three parts:

• Key trends shaping the landscape
  • Growth of the global services market: An update on the size and growth of the global services exports market by revenue, headcount, and center set-up activity
  • Evolving geography-specific trends: Perspectives on global services delivery in 2018 by region
  • Shifting sourcing models and services mix: An update on key trends vis-à-vis functions supported, evolving sourcing strategies, and uptick in digital activity
  • The rise of reshoring: Insights on key trends around service provider activity in offshore and onshore locations
• Risk watch
  • Risk dashboard – risk ratings across parameters, such as quality of infrastructure, safety & security, digital readiness, geopolitical, regulatory, and macroeconomic environment, for leading (offshore and nearshore) delivery locations across the region
  • Updates on key changes in risk profiles for various delivery locations – important events in the past year that are likely to impact important delivery locations across the region (e.g., new tax reforms in the Philippines affecting the IT/BP sector, changes in the U.S. trade policies affecting Mexico’s service delivery landscape, weakening of major currencies as compared to the U.S. dollar, and expected evolution of service delivery portfolios amidst the adoption of GDPR)
  • Key risks/opportunities to watch out for at various delivery locations across various regions (e.g., macroeconomic concerns in Argentina, South Africa’s emergence as an attractive service delivery location amidst new government incentives, Lithuania emerging as an attractive service delivery location for digital services)
• PEAK Matrix™: Objective, data-driven, and comparative assessment of locations specific to a market segment (function and process). Key market segments in scope include:
  • Information Technology – Application Development and Maintenance (IT-ADM)
  • Contact center (English language)
  • Transactional Business Process Services (BPS)
  • Complex/judgment-intensive BPS
  • Bilingual (Spanish and English language) BPS
  • Multi-lingual (European languages) BPS
  • Analytics
  • Digital services
  • Engineering/R&D services
  • IT services in the United States of America
• The report also provides perspectives on the overall maturity of key locations leveraged for global service delivery

Membership(s)

Locations Insider™