TCS Continues Push in Latin America

Just recently I wrote about the Latin American outsourcing market (you can read about that here). In that blog, I wrote about Stefanini IT Solutions, which is headquartered in Brazil. But it isn’t just companies in Brazil and other Latin American countries that believe the market south of our border is promising. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of India’s top outsourcing firms, has been working the Latin American market for some time, and doing quite well there.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Henry Manzano, CEO of TCS Latin America. Founded in 2002, TCS Latin America now operates in 11 countries there, including two global delivery centers in Mexico and Uruguay, two BPO services centers in Chile and Uruguay, as well as local delivery centers in Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador and Mexico.

“TCS Started with onlyl a couple of people, to analyze and penetrate the Latin American market. In 2008 I took the ownership of Latin America group and now we have around 7,000 people. It has been wonderful growth,” says Manzano. “We grow every year more than 100% and we also bought two companies, which have helpd us grow even more quickly and expand our operations in Latin America.”

The TCS Latin America group accounts for about 4 percent to 5 percent of TCS’ overall revenue, which was $6.3 billion for fiscal year ended 31 March 2010. Manzano says his division has set aggressive growth goals for the next few years.

The division supports numerous clients (more than 150) that operate at the local, regional and international levels. Clients include Brasil Telecom, Goodyear, Petrobras, Equifax, and others.

What I found interesting is that about 95 percent of the TCS’ workforce in Latin America is made up of locals. “We bring people from Indian to train the local employees, and we also have people that have gone to India to train, and are now back working in Latin America,” Manzano says.

This idea of hiring locally, and helping to cultivate the local labor force, is something I heard from Stefanini IT Solutions as well. Granted, that company is a Latin American company, but both Antonio Moreira, CEO of the North American division of Stefanini, and TCS’ Manzano talked about the increasingly talented and educated labor force in Latin America, particularly in IT fields – all of which are helping to cultivate a much richer, more successful IT outsourcing market.

TCS has quite a few U.S.-based customers that leverage its Latin American delivery centers. Some of these U.S. companies have operations in Latin America, and some don’t but are taking advantage of the near-shore opportunities TCS offers there.