Délocalisations: une manifestation d'espionnage économique ?

Les renseignements généraux viennent de publier un rapport mettant en avant les cibles que peuvent représenter les PMPE françaises ainsi que l'activité d'espionnage industriel à laquelle se livrerait la Chine envers ces entreprises.

Selon les journaux comme le figaro, certaines "délocalisations" relèveraient plutôt de l'espionnage économique et de tentatives de la Chine pour récupérer des "secrets" industriels.

Malheureusement, les pseudo démonstrations des journaux ne montrent rien car les exemples donnés sont des actions tout à fait légales et légitimes dans le commerce international (telle entreprise, dont l'actionnariat est chinois, décide de changer son centre de production .... Après tout l'actionnariat n'est pas arrivé d'un coup et a le droit de faire ce qu'il veut si il est majoritaire non ?) et on place sous l'étiquette "Chine", un ensemble de cas qui n'ont pas forcément de liens entre eux et ne représentent pas peut être une volonté chinoise générale..

Bref, on nous ressort la cinquième colonne cette fois-ci chinoise sans parler du tout dans tout ceci de nos amis américains ;-))

Un peu comme dans la lutte organisée contre Microsoft où personne ne parle d'IBM quand on dénonce les abus ;-))

Demande en baisse pour les spécialistes IT

Gartner sees less demand for IT specialists | Tech News on ZDNet 

On recherche moins de spécialistes IT et plus de gens qui comprennent AUSSI le contexte, les fonctionnalités, le “business”.

C’est une conséquence logique de l’évolution des technologies qui se présentent se plus en plus comme des “briques” à assembler.

Cela peut provoquer une accélération de l’offshore programming car les tâches purement IT devront être de moins en moins cher et surtout de plus en plus facilement externalisables car parfaitement délimitées (de moins en moins de développement en V car de plus en plus d’importance pour les spécifications, l’analyse A TOUT MOMENT DU PROCESSUS DE DEVELOPPEMENT)

Par ailleurs, l’offshore programming inversé (l’exportation de compétences de NOS pays vers d’autres pays) connaîtra un essort puisque pour l’instant, les spécialistes “métiers” sont chez nous. Un problème: veulent-ils, en France, voyager ???

L'Europe deviendrait un gros contractant d'offshore ?

D'après Moham Murti de sify.com, l'Europe deviendrait lentement mais sûrement un gros "offshoreur". Cet avis est souvent répété en inde depuis quelques temps maius l'intérêt de l'article réside ici dans le fait qu'est cité en exemple Axa ! ("For instance, from the moment Michael Jameson became head of the Paris-based multinational subsidiary of AXA, with multiple specialisations in the field of asset management, he discovered the importance of business processes by focusing on the value chains most relevant to the company. AXA IM decided to outsource the entirety of its back-office activities. The company has since grown by leaps and bounds.
Michael Jameson and many like him in European companies are beginning to realise that they cannot continue to compete effectively on a global scale without leveraging the increased efficiency and flexibility they can gain through offshoring or outsourcing. ")
Rappel: la valeur des principaux contrats outsourcés par l'Europe l'année dernière serait de 58 milliards de dollars.

L'article (le site initial, sify.com, est rempli de flash et autres gadgets qui rendent l'article difficilement trouvable ;-)):

Some will cringe at, though others may delight in, a dictionary that defines historic monuments as `fixed assets' and lemons as `defective capital goods'. One of the most useful and entertaining dictionaries online is the OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms - worth the hefty download of nearly 800 pages.

The glossary goes beyond clarifying the arcane jargon and other technical terms for which the OECD and other organisations are well known.

Within its 6,000 entries there are indeed 17 different definitions for `value-added', and 10 for words dealing with income, but only one definition of the term `offshoring' - used to describe a business (or a government) decision to replace domestically supplied service functions with imported services produced offshore.

Europe, slowly but surely, could become one of the leading markets for offshore contracts.

For instance, from the moment Michael Jameson became head of the Paris-based multinational subsidiary of AXA, with multiple specialisations in the field of asset management, he discovered the importance of business processes by focusing on the value chains most relevant to the company. AXA IM decided to outsource the entirety of its back-office activities. The company has since grown by leaps and bounds.

Michael Jameson and many like him in European companies are beginning to realise that they cannot continue to compete effectively on a global scale without leveraging the increased efficiency and flexibility they can gain through offshoring or outsourcing.

The value of major outsourcing contracts awarded by European companies last year was a record $58 billion worldwide.

Despite some companies being sold on outsourcing, however, for most firms in Europe, there's no place like home. Although the offshoring model has captured the imagination, it is yet to produce the wholesale transformation of corporate Europe.

What's more, if companies do go offshore, they would prefer to do so either through a service provider they have worked with, rather than start a new relationship with an offshore outsourcing specialist or set up camp offshore.

That could be bad news for India's big outsourcing providers, who will continue to struggle wooing Europeans - unless Indian companies quickly manage to establish their brands and a critical installed base in Western Europe.

Western European firms' spending with Indian IT service providers accounted for just 1 per cent of the total IT services market in 2004.

Even the largest of Indian offshore service providers is a distinctly third-tier player in Europe. Is India's period of competitive advantage waning? Among the three common reasons stated are: India `s terrible Infrastructure, Indian wages rising at a 20 per cent annual clip, and other countries who are maturing and getting involved with the global economy becoming more attractive.

There also, seems to be a strong herd instinct among European firms looking offshore. The greatest influence on choice of location, after benchmarking hard facts such as costs, skills and time zones, was "following competitors".

When a large German Bank was searching for a place to house its software development centre, it considered geographical and cultural proximity to the EU important.

After looking at the more traditional outsourcing venues in Asia, the German bank decided to build its state-of-the-art development centre in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, which is within a two-and-a-half hour flight from Frankfurt.

So, just what was the lure? Minsk isn't the most forward, wealthy or democratic of cities, but hey, it's safer than London, cheaper than Frankfurt, less hectic than Rome and a darn sight cleaner than India. And that is where a rival Nordic bank had set up its offshore centre.

This is just one instance of several West European manufacturing and service companies that are beginning to take the path less travelled when setting up an offshore outsourcing operation. For progressive European companies, EU enlargement presents unique opportunities for European business.

Value chains can be reorganised across the continent to benefit from the current competitive advantages of new member-states. This may enable companies to keep production within the EU that would otherwise have been transferred to Asia, and to maintain their competitiveness.

The savings enjoyed by companies that move labour-intensive service industry work from the Europe to countries in the East with lower labour costs have triggered an exodus of business-processing jobs. It is estimated that by 2015 roughly 10 million of them will have moved into the enlarged EU countries.

Companies that send their back-office jobs offshore often cut their labour costs by as much as half, and save billions of dollars by moving to East European countries, where labour is cheap. The savviest operators redesign business processes to exploit automation and take full advantage of the new environments potential.

Lets take a look at where else the Western European companies are looking. Russia is proving a convenient location for Nordic companies looking for inexpensive, high-skilled labour. Further, French firms are opening call centres in North Africa, Mauritius and Vietnam.

South Africa is also an outsourcing destination to watch - its popularity is actually forecast to grow faster than India's over the next few years.

European companies are beginning to have no qualms about shipping out large parts of their finance departments to East Europe and Asia, including India. They have a good sense of the talent out there - and what it costs, reaping big savings.

A host of functions are being uprooted. Among them, accounts payable, invoicing and accounts receivable, general ledger, management reporting, payroll and local statutory compliance, etc. Yes, language can be an issue but not an insurmountable one.

France, Germany and the UK have voiced major concerns about companies favouring better and cheaper conditions outside Europe. The German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, recently attacked employers such as Siemens as "unpatriotic" for planning to close or downsize operations in Germany.

The offshore market now offers a much broader spectrum of services, challenging perceptions of where you can go. Needless to add, there are a combination of concerns about service quality, loss of internal know-how and lack of control over the arrangement.

If companies are outsourcing finance at all, they are mostly doing so piece by piece. Most companies are still getting comfortable with the idea of process outsourcing as an option.

I would describe it as `toe-dipping'. And, I do not expect this to change. People are starting with the little contracts they have signed, and using that as a base to grow. Nobody gets thanked if a BPO project goes right, but everyone notices when it goes wrong.

Many West European companies are already investing in R&D, in East Europe and Asia. Many of them are going international in R&D to strengthen their competitiveness in innovation.

In Germany, despite its reputation as a place for innovation and technology, more than half of the companies that have invested in R&D abroad have reduced their research capacities at home.

The main reason for offshoring R&D is to support the companies' production facilities abroad. Another important decisive factor for offshoring are better conditions for R&D: lower labour costs, especially for R&D-employees, less regulation, the availability of qualified employees and more flexible working hours.

European managers who, at one time, were glossing over the glitches, are understanding the economic logic behind outsourcing, as compelling for survival.

They are accepting the fact that a large, vertically-integrated finance model will not survive.

At the end of the day, European companies are realising that they simply cannot afford to be doing everything at high-cost headquarters. And despite the stuttering growth of the outsourcing market in Europe, there are signs that that the message is getting through.

Carrefour peaufine son expérience de l'offshore informatique

Carrefour peaufine son expérience de l'offshore informatique

Encore une histoire qui soi-disant début il y a longtemps (1998) alors qu’il y a peu, quand l’offshore n’était pas à la mode, on jurait ses grands dieux qu’il ne se passait rien

Carrefour avait, avant le départ de Mr Bernard, réorganisé son informatique interne en rassemblant dans une filiale, les informaticiens du groupe (a priori environ 600).

Accenture, qui est un prestataire important pour Carrefour, est il le prestataire masqué dont parle l’article ?

La fin de l’article est assez marrante: “Un bémol subsiste toutefois pour le DSIG : aucune des sociétés démarchées lors de l'appel d'offres fin 2004 n'a souhaité s'engager sur un plan de reprise d'activité sans connaître au préalable l'application, son périmètre géographique et fonctionnel”

Etonnant non ? Personne n’est candidat au suicide chez les prestataires d’offshore ? Bizarre

Effervescence de la recherche en Chine

Quelques chiffres intéressants à l’heure où certains pensent que la France et l’Europe peuvent garder la recherche tout en sous-traitant la manufacture…

• 665000 chercheurs en Chine
• 12 000 000 d’étudiants en 2001
• 22 nouvelles universités ouvertes en 2001
• 1782 demandes internationales de brevets déposées en 2004 (38% de progression sur un an contre 1,9% aux US et 4,3 sur l’ensemble)
• 70 milliards d’euros pour la recherche scientifique dépensés entre 2002 et 2006 (3ème budget mondial de recherche ramené au pouvoir d’achat moyen par habitant)
• 1428 brevets déposés et publiés en chinois en 2004

 

Qui parle encore d'offshore et de sous-traitants à propos des sociétés indiennes ?

Depuis de nombreuses années, le bon marketing de l’Inde en matière d’offshore programming et d’outsourcing a fait croire à de nombreuses sociétés occidentales que l’Inde était un réservoir de sous-traitance, d’offshore programming, d’outsourcing, de délocalisations et .. uniquement cela.

Ceux qui se sont intéressés à la réalité de ce qui se passait et se passe dans ce pays (et aussi en Chine) se sont aperçus du double discours et de la réalité de l’”offshore” indien qui en fait n’est qu’un produit d’appel alors que dans la réalité les sociétés IT indiennes se considèrent, à raison, comme les concurrents véritables de sociétés comme Cap Gemini, Accenture, EDS et autres SSII mondiales.

Ces dernières et leurs concurrentes plus petites (en France Steria, Atos, etc..) ont de plus en plus à faire face à la concurrence frontale des sociétés indiennes qui n’hésiteront pas à les racheter un jour ne serait-ce que par la puissance financière écransante que ces “nouveaux “ venus ont par rapport aux sociétés IT du “vieux monde”.

Si il y avait encore besoin de connaître la réalité de l’offshore programming” indien, qui n’est qu’un habillage marketing, voici quelques chiffres:

India's Wipro Technologies said revenue for its second quarter, ended Sept. 30, grew 26% to $568 million. In posting a double-digit sales gain for the period, Wipro joined fellow Indian firms TCS and Infosys, which reported similar results last week.

By contrast, IBM's vaunted Global Services arm on Monday said sales grew by a mere 3% in its third quarter. In August, EDS said its second-quarter revenue dropped 1%. The only major Western IT services firm that's even close to matching the growth seen by the offshore players is Accenture, which recorded a 15% revenue gain in its most recent quarter.

Wipro also reported strong growth in second-quarter net income, up 23% to $107.1 million. It also added 39 new clients in the period, including two new business-process-outsourcing customers.

 

Outsourcing - plus de contrats mais plus petits

Outsourcing - more, smaller deals being made - IT Outsourcing - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com 

A retenir: contrats internationaux  183 en 2005 contre 240 en 2004

et 128 contrats de plus de €32bn (70 per cent of which belong to CSC, EDS and IBM) se finissent l’année prochaine.

Entre 2003 et 2005, les tarifs journaliers moyens auraient augmenté en France de 7%

Hitechpros publie dans une lettre du 27/10 quelques statistiques sur les prix et le marché de la prestation informatique en France.

Nouvelle étonnante !! Le prix des prestations journalières aurait augmenté de 7% !!

Alors que dans le même temps, tout le monde parle d’offshore …

Ce serait intéressant d’en savoir plus sur ces statistiques : nb d’informaticiens concernés (uniquement ceux qui étaient en mission ? sur combien de temps ?), types de contrats ?, lieux des missions ? statistiques concernant ce qui est acheté réellement ou ce qui est offert ?, etc..

Par rapport aux prix “standards” de l’offshore (- de 150 euros ht/jour en moyenne) ou aux prix mondiaux de prestations (—> www.rentacoder.com) ces prix semblent très elevés …