Egypt is becoming increasingly popular as a destination for ITO and BPO given its advantageous location between Europe, the Middle East and Africa; its young, educated and multi-lingual population; and strong IT infrastructure. Indeed, the country is now widely considered one of the fastest-growing destinations for offshore services.
Several large multinationals are already active in the Egyptian ITO and BPO market, including Vodafone, Orange, Teleperformance and Majorel, with RAYA Contact Center and Xceed among the important local players in the field.
The emphasis on human capital and both private and public investment has helped to expand the sector workforce, which increased from 169,000 employees in 2017 to 212,000 employees in 2019. This also involves training workers in more specialised skills, with ITIDA launching courses in artificial intelligence, data science and web development in 2020, in line with the Digital Egypt plan. In cooperation with the MCIT, ITIDA aims to train around 115,000 individuals in the skills needed by large multinationals.
As the population has gained more specialised skills, the country has been able to market itself as a provider of higher-value-added services. While in the past it largely focused on multilingual contact centres, in recent years the local industry has moved towards high-value niches such as product development and design.
As a result of these trends, the sector has proven resilient to the pandemic. Existing delivery centres were able to accommodate additional services that other locations could not handle, while a number of companies established new delivery centres in Egypt in 2020, including Webhelp, TTEC, Transcom and Robiquity.
ITO, BPO and other ICT exports are an important source of revenue for Egypt, which provided services to approximately 100 countries in 20 languages as of 2018. According to market research firm IDC, Egypt’s ICT exports – which include ITO and BPO – were set to expand from $3.3bn in 2017 to $4.7bn in 2020. This projection reflects the benefits to the segment of the mass shift to online operations worldwide.
The pandemic has accelerated existing digital and outsourcing trends, as companies looked to move to the cloud and rationalise budgets. The government’s investment of $1.6bn between 2018 and 2020 to improve internet provision facilitated the transitions necessitated by the pandemic, Amr Mahfouz, CEO of ITIDA, told press in December 2020. “When people had to leave their offices, we had the capacity to allow them to work from home, and this left us with over 17% of the outsourcing market worldwide.”
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