London: South Africa is emerging as a serious challenger to India to take away some of its call centre jobs, a report said in London on Saturday (Nov 6, 2004).

South Africa reckons it has a lot to offer British companies, which until now have been shipping jobs to India, according to a report published in 'The Times'.

It argues that as well as having a huge supply of labour - unemployment is at 40 per cent - it is in the same time zone as the UK, and English is widely spoken. And, with its established domestic call-centre business, South Africa has a ready supply of middle managers who can be employed at the local rate, reducing the need for companies to send out costly British staff.

But the biggest selling point for South Africa is that the price of phone calls is set to fall when the telecom industry is deregulated next year. At present, calls cost four times as much as they do in India.

"India's supremacy as the No.1 choice for UK companies locating contact centres and business-process operations in lower-cost offshore locations is about to be challenged," Luke Mills, of Calling the Cape, a not-for-profit group promoting South Africa to foreign investors, said.

Although South Africa has only 2,000 jobs in offshore outsourced work - a tiny number set against the 63,000 employed in India - that figure is set to soar, according to Datamonitor, a research agency.