Egypt calls the shots

Representatives from Xceed, Raya, C3, Tamina and Ecco Call Centres will be exhibiting under the Egyptian pavilion.

The pavilion will be supported by the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) in Egypt, a programme initiated by the Egyptian Government to support and advance e-business services and an export-oriented IT and telecoms sector in Egypt.

Mr Mohamed Omran, CEO of ITIDA explained:

"One of ITIDA's key roles is to help put Egypt on the map as one of the main call centre destinations in the world. The national pavilion enables us to showcase the collective advantages that Egypt can offer in the highly competitive world of offshoring".

Egypt's minister for Communication and Information Technology Dr. Tareq Kamel, added:
"The Egyptian government views the country's offshoring capability as a centre piece of our economic diversification strategy. We believe that Egypt has the potential to become a location of choice for western contact centres and we have undertaken a series of measures to drive and support the growth of this industry, from investing in key enablers, such as telecommunications infrastructure, to overhauling our business laws to make them more user friendly for western businesses".

Egypt's emergence as a significant player in the offshore sector was underlined with the news that Cairo will be hosting the 2006 Offshore Customer Management International Conference, the world's leading conference for offshore customer management and BPO decision makers. The decision to award the conference to Egypt follows a visit by the conference organizers. The conference will take place in Cairo from 5th -7th June.

The Offshore Customer Management International Conference is a strategic business event attended by executives from companies planning to expand existing offshore operations and territories or investigating emerging offshore destinations. It combines an expert international speaker panel, case studies from leading offshore practitioners, site visits to offshore operations and unparalleled peer group networking with the off-shoring community

Further evidence of the progress Egypt has made in this area is provided by a recent Datamonitor report. "Egypt is expected to experience the most aggressive offshore business growth in the world to the end of the decade," states the report, highlighting the combination of lower-value cost of labour, a highly-educated labour pool with multilingual skills, the advanced state of its technological and commercial development, and the country's investment-friendly attitudes.