Essar Group, a smallish Indian conglomerate, acquired a bit of fame earlier this year when Vodafone bought out Essar’s partner in Hutch-Essar, the fourth-largest Indian wireless carrier. Essar now has a 33% stake in Vodafone-Essar in addition to its own many Indian subsidiaries, including steel, oil refining, and shipping business. In the US, Essar causes barely a ripple, yet one of its subsidiaries here could be quietly rewriting the rules for the BPO industry.
The company is Aegis BPO Services, with its headquarters in Texas, which is the 8th- largest 8 BPO operator in India. Essar patched the organization together over the past 7 years through a couple of US acquisitions and some rapid organic growth. It now has about 8,000 employees and $225 million in annual revenues. This is according to Madhu Vuppuluri, president of the Americas for Essar, whom I met at a dinner at the Indian Consulate in New York last night.
The key thing to understand about Aegis is that half of its employees are in the United States—a far cry from the heavily India-centric approach taken by industry leaders such as Genpact and WNS. In fact, Vuppuluri tells me, the company even has a call center staffed by 300 people in downtown Manhattan, one of the most expensive places in the world to do business.
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