The document discusses how business services exports are an important issue for the Australian government. It describes how business services have grown in Australia, including services like call centers and IT outsourcing. One key issue is whether these services will be exported to Asia or whether Australia will import more services. It provides an example of an Indian company, Aegis, establishing a business process outsourcing center in Melbourne that employs over 500 people and services Asian markets due to Australia's diversity of Asian language skills. The author argues business services are an important part of adjusting Australia's economy away from mining towards more exports.

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May 13 2015 at 12:07 PM | Updated May 13 2015 at 4:08 PM
Services exports key issue for government
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The business services sector takes on skilled roles that others don't want to do.
How Australian governments organise outsourcing and
provision of expensive skill-intensive services will be a key item
in just how well Australia integrates its services export economy with the
expanding growth of the Asia Pacific.
A huge business services economy has grown up in Australia covering things like
shared services (such as accounting), call centres, IT integration, business analytics,
transactions processing, printing and document services and a long list of others.
Over recent years, this list, summed up as business to business, has been
increasingly parcelled out, differentiated and outsourced mostly within Australia
and allocated to specialist firms and groups, instead of being operated internally by
large conglomerates.
These external suppliers can make incidental and ancillary side issues their main
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core business, with consequent improvements in underlying economics,
management attention and profitability.
Now that the mining boom has not so much collapsed as scaled back from
unsustainable overheating to a more normal state of affairs, Australia needs
substantial improvement in other export areas across its economy to adjust.
WHICH WAY WILL BUSINESS TO BUSINESS GO?
In the business to business area, a key issue is whether Australia will be successfully
selling business services in the Asia Pacific, or whether it will be shutting down
segments of its economy, to a background chorus of rising unemployment, and
allowing an expanding, one-way importation of services from overseas.
One touchstone will be an Asia Pacific Analytics, Social Media and Multilingual
capability hub aimed to create a business process outsourcing centre of excellence
with $4 million to support up to 550 jobs in Melbourne.
This was announced in October 2014 with the endorsement of the Victorian
government.
The business proponent is Aegis, an Indian-originated services company. It is
wholly-owned by Essar, a US$35 billion ($44 billion) Indian conglomerate.
Like several of its local counterparts, it is following a path of massive expansion
throughout the world, and sees Australian capabilities and expertise as a natural co-
participant in this process.
THE CLINCHER FOR AUSTRALIA
The clincher for Australia when it came to the Victorian analytics and social media
location was the ability to provide these services in a much wider range of Asian
languages than could be managed anywhere actually in Asia.
The Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection can provide
around the hundred mark when it comes to foreign languages, often including
several dialects or full blown different languages from the one polity.
This diversity in turn is reflected in the variety of Asian languages available for
business use in a practical context, combined with constantly extending overseas
optical fibre cables to provide the delivery.
"We believe we can put a Japanese speaker on the phone more cheaply here than in
Tokyo," said Anthony Seaegg!, CEO of Aegis Australia Services.
"The global CEO [Sandip Sen] was looking for a place where he could put our hand
on our heart and say we could deliver. Here in Australia we have 38 languages.
"It's notably for business expansion in SE Asia."

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As some illustration of the sheer weight the Indian conglomerates are increasingly
exercising, Aegis classes itself as a global outsourcing and technology services
company, operating in 43 locations across nine countries and employing over
40,000 employees globally.
Services are supplied to over 150 clients in banking and financial services, insurance,
technology, telecommunications, healthcare, travel and hospitality, consumer
goods, retail, energy and utilities.
BUSINESS SERVICES ALIVE AND WELL
Aegis Australia has been running in Melbourne since 1992 with four core product
offerings, the biggest two being call centre and shared services, complemented by IT
integration and business analytics to enhance overall serviceability.
An example of IT integration is selling and installing a natural language speech
recognition (NLSR) system, in a move to enhance the offering.
Business analytics can do predictive forecasting for logistics despatch and delivery
services.
One of the major targets is government, which provides a usually more stable
operating environment than the private marketplace, tends to want the majority of
the work done inside Australia, and with strategies normally aligned to the expected
term of government.
For all its blandness as a description, business services are alive and well. In
Australia, Anthony Seaegg feels he is facing four or five competitors in a similar
league, 15 to 20 tier two groups with a miscellany of specialities, and easily over 100
suppliers at the tier three level.
"I want to do everything our potential customers don't want to do," he puts it.
"Seasonal, one-off or non-core activities."
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