Reuters to raise India offshoring strength

Reuters Ltd, the news agency, has plans to ramp up its offshoring strength in India to 400 in the current year and then to 700 in the following year. This will include people both in data content as well as for news gathering.

Mitya New, managing director and senior operating officer of Reuters Japan Ltd, said that the outsourcing of news from Bangalore was still a pilot project and it would be starting with six people on an experimental basis.

Incidentally, this is the first time that the global news agency has initiated any operation of this kind where news of a global nature would be outsourced from a single country.

Explaining this idea, New said that basically it involved passive work - such as writing on results of corporates - which would not involve actual interacting with the corporates.

In the non-news data content segment, Reuters has a significant number of people working in India apart from countries such as Singapore and Japan among others. In the news segment, initially the offshoring focus would be on US clients but if the experiment was a success then other clients in other countries would also start receiving the feed.

The main idea behind outsourcing news to India is the cost advantage which the country offers "while there are benefits from concentrating work in a specific location," New pointed out. Incidentally, this is an initiative by the global management of Reuters and the Indian arm, Reuters India, would not be really involved with this in any significant way.

Reuters India is also getting a new managing director, Venkat Ramani, who will be replacing New once the latter moves to Japan.

Reuters India will soon be introducing an equity product here, an order routing system which would enable brokers here to place orders abroad.

Another product in the line is for fund managers which would enable them to analyse portfolios on a real-time basis. A third product has been lined up for the commodities market, deliverable on the Internet.

In India, around 92 per cent of Reuters' revenues come from non-media transactions such as its forex, equity packages and so on.