Looking for the next low cost country

No sooner did I ask about the next low cost country (LCC), than I stumbled onto the Gartner Group’s research on Outsourcing, which includes a list of the top 30 countries for offshore services.

Gartner publishes a lot of interesting business research, mostly on topics revolving around IT. Take any IT business topic which I have looked for information on in the past 5 years and Gartner has published a white paper on it. Content management, customer relationship management, SAP, enterprise software, you name it, Gartner covers it.  My only problem is, they also charge for it. I only hear about Gartner reports when someone else quotes them, as did Cecilia Piaggio in an article about IT outsourcing in Argentina.

The article is full of interesting facts about doing business with Argentina. According to a popular saying, “Argentineans are Italians who speak Spanish but think they are English”. The country has the fastest growing economy in Latin America, close cultural proximity with the US and Europe and engineering wages significantly lower than in Hong Kong. Around 40,000 IT professionals work in the country; both Google and NEC have recently opened regional hubs in Argentina.

Unfortunately, Cecilia conceeds that engineering graduates from Argentina’s 50 universities cannot keep pace with demand. We all know what that means – expect salaries in Argentina to start rising.

The search for the next LCC continues…