It may not yet have the identical profile as South Asia or Eastern Europe. However, Latin America is becoming an increasingly famous vacation spot for businesses seeking to set up shared provider centers, both serving home markets or as a part of nearby or even global shared services techniques. Furthermore, at the side of this boom within the captive quarter, Latin America has become the focus of a growing hobby for fundamental outsourcing companies whose access to the marketplace has had knock-on results. Throw into this already volatile mix the current financial instability, and it’s easy to peer why the area’s hobby is making waves across and beyond the shared offerings and outsourcing space in 2009.
We convened a panel representing practitioners, companies, and advisors to test the contemporary degree of adulthood of the Latin American market and examine how – and if – the financial malaise affecting tons of the relaxation of the global economic system impacts operations within the place.
Attending were:
Laura Bao Castro
CR FSSC Controller
Intel Corporation
Esteban Carril
Director, Latin America Finance Operations
EMC Corporation
Mauro Mezzano
Partner
Vantaz Group Consulting
Ricardo Neves
PwC Global Sourcing Leader for South America
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Q: I suppose the primary question we should look at is: is it proper to talk of “Latin American shared services”? Latin America is a considerable region geographically and in terms of population; it has a smaller linguistic diversity than, for example, Europe; however, there are massive variations between Brazil and Costa Rica. To what quantity is it without a doubt possible for companies – captive or BPO – to take a sincerely nearby method in Latin America? Is it impossible to avoid having sizable resources in man or woman countries?
Ricardo Neves: This is a place one of a kind from different areas within the globe. If you communicate about intra-area services, you’re speaking about main languages which might be, in a few ways, close to each other; you’ve got a closeness of standard subculture additionally; and usually, what you spot with multinational or nearby operations right here is that the more prominent nations like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile correspond to a considerable size of the functions. Usually, in case you look at most of the global or multinational corporations in the area, they’ve 50% or maybe 75% of their operations accomplished in or three international locations at most – after which 10, 12 other countries wherein they do have functions however which make up best 25% or less in their commercial enterprise.
This offers an assignment when putting in place a nearby center due to the fact there is a scale for the more prominent nations that is not present within, the smaller ones – and what I’ve seen right here is a mixture between absolutely centrally run shared offerings and a lesser nearby presence in smaller nations to make sure the correct scale is done, The right aid is accomplished at the regional stage. There are corporations based totally in Brazil that I’ve visible who have local shared offerings – like the brewer AmBev, now related with InBev, and Anheuser-Busch, which has a vast local shared service primarily based in Sao Paulo serving no longer just operations inside the vicinity, however also the company’s operations in Canada for the Labatt operations. Unilever has additional installation and HR-shared offerings – and has sold its finance-shared offerings to Capgemini in the region.
