Accenture to hire 30,000 in Asia

Outsourcing and consulting firm Accenture is planning to hire up to 30,000 staff across China, India and the Philippines.

Company board members announced their intentions to strengthen offshore business last week in a conference call.

Accenture currently employs 19,000 people in the three countries. The company said that, depending on demand, it could grow that number to between 30,000 and 50,000 over the next three years.

Steve Rohleder, Accenture's COO, said: "We have recently made an important decision in our offshore strategy to dramatically expand our global delivery network. We're actively recruiting in key locations throughout our global delivery network. Our approach is to defend and extend our position in the marketplace.

"This means more aggressively going after and winning application maintenance and development work, allowing us to take greater advantage of labour arbitrage and cross-sell additional services. This strategy will open new opportunities for additional work and will be accretive to our margins."

But Rohleder added that the company is not limited to expanding in those three locations.

He added: "If we get into a situation, for example, in India where a specific city has reached saturation from a salary standpoint and from a cost structure standpoint, we have the flexibility to move and to grow a different location - not only within India or China or the Philippines but also outside, say in eastern Europe or Latin America. And we have actually started that process as well."

The company made the announcement as it said net revenues for its third quarter ending 31 May 2005 were $4.08bn, the highest in the company's history.