7. Read the following excerpt, and using what you have learned in this chapter, discuss how offshoring creates opportunities for the countries involved. Sudhakar Shenoy, chief executive of Information Management Consultants (IMC) in Reston, makes an effective pitch for offshoring. Several years ago IMC saw a market developing for software that would allow biotech companies to make better and faster use of the new human genome research. Doing it here, Shenoy calculated, would cost several million dollars, which he figured would have priced the product too high for most customers. But by having a small group of engineers at IMC’s Indian subsidiary do much of the coding work, he was able to bring the project in at $500,000.
The result: IMC now has a thriving line of business in bioinformatics, with major clients and a growing payroll of six-figure PhDs here. And there are more engineers than ever—six here for every one in India.
But that’s only part of the good-news story. In Pune, where IMC’s Indian operations are located, an airport under construction will require lots of U.S. engineering, design and electronics. At the same time, IMC’s Indian engineers, who earned annual salaries of $3,500 a decade ago, now command up to $12,000—enough to buy all manner of imported consumer goods.
Source: Excerpted from Steven Pearlstein, “Still Short of the Offshoring Ideal,” Washington Post, March 12, 2004.