Advertisers Find Outsourcing Success in Bangladesh

Each month Dell, the world’s largest computer seller, pushes around 4.5 million catalogues promoting its products through the letterboxes of homes, businesses and institutions across Europe. Dell’s direct selling model has been a staggering success, but few of its customers could guess that each one of the catalogues is laid out by a small company in Dhaka.

Nor could the readers of some of northern Europe’s largest magazines and newspapers ever imagine that the sparkling adverts appearing on the pages in front of them each morning are put together by another company, also located in the heart of the Bangladeshi capital. During the past few months there has been much talk about the huge potential of IT outsourcing and almost as much noise about the problems the industry faces, in terms of the lack of skilled labour and poor internet connections. However in the field of Desk Top Publishing (DTP), Bangladesh has been quietly making a name for itself for several years.

Imtiaz Ilahi, managing director of Graphic People, a joint venture company between Bangladesh and Denmark, now has 50 employees, many of them working on the Dell catalogues. He said Graphic People’s Danish partners had explored outsourcing alternatives in around 30 countries before settling on Bangladesh. “The catalogues normally range from 16 to 72 pages and there are also flyers and direct advertising materials, moreover we are working in 15 different languages,” Imtiaz said. Graphic People receive the text, photos and instructions from Copenhagen and then fit the text and photos into a template. The template has been developed to cope with the different European languages, so the fact that the DTP artist cannot understand the text is not important.

“Our basic advantage is cost. Desktop publishing is very man hour intensive and it was becoming increasingly expensive to do in Europe. To do the work in Bangladesh costs less than 20 percent of the price in Europe, and we are around 30 percent cheaper than India,” Imtiaz said. But it is not just price that keeps the clients happy, “it’s also about quality,” explains Imtiaz. Graphic People now employs 50 people with two Danes on hand mainly for training and development purposes. Dennis Worck, one the Danes, who works as production director, said that in the four years the joint venture has been running the quality of staff has improved sharply. “When we started the type of people we recruited were far below the standard we are getting right now. Over the last few years it has really gone up and has reached a level where we have to spend less and less time on training,” Worck said. Graphic People is not the only Danish IT joint venture, indeed there are now around 20 opertating in Dhaka in fields ranging from software development to animation, and more are looking to establish themselves.

Earlier this year Denmark sponsored one of the country’s major IT exhibitions, SoftExpo 2008,where the Danish ambassador described Bangladesh’s IT industry as having almost ‘unlimited potential.” Another success story in the Desk Top Publishing sector has been Click House, a joint venture between Danish Click House and local Visual Soft. “Our agency has more than 50 customers in Denmark, ” said Thomas Juul Jensen, project adviser of Click House, that now counts two daily Danish newspapers among its clients. Sitting in the company’s stylish Banani office last week Jensen was correcting advertising images for a big Danish weekly magazine distributed by a supermarket chain. “Basically we receive pictures and text from our clients and then we put together all the materials to make a complete catalogue,” Jensen explained.

“We make the soft copy and then we send it to Denmark via the internet for final printing.”

Working on a magazine or catalogue, deadlines can be staggered to fit into the weekly rhythm. With daily newspapers the pace is more demanding. “We get all the materials the day before and we deliver the ads to the newspapers in the afternoon European time and they can print them that night,” Jensen said.

Jensen said cultural differences do create challenges. “The layout is not normal Bangladeshi layout, its Danish layout, so I have to educate the people to accept that, okay, this is actually what Danish people like.”

However he recognizes the quality of Bangladeshi DTP and graphic artists.”When we came here for the first time last year, we were surprised about the quality of the people. I don’t see any difference in the technical abilities in Bangladesh and Denmark.”

And he is clear why outsourcing has the potential to grow. “Denmark is a low unemployment country—- almost everybody is working. If I am a newspaper owner and want a DTP artist, I have to pay at least seven times more than I pay people working here.”

Of course there are problems, and while the success of small companies is encouraging, many experts believe Bangladesh needs to develop a major IT firm to put the country on the map.

At Graphic People Imtiaz points to failures in infrastructure as a major hurdle, be it unreliable internet connections or power supplies. These mean his company has to pay heavily to provide back up solutions. Internet pricing is also an issue although Imtiaz was positive about the moves now being taken by Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission to lower costs.

“But we really need to do more to brand Bangladesh as an outsourcing nation. We can win business here and there, but it needs the government to launch a broader campaign to raise the awareness outside the country of what is possible in Bangladesh.”

Source: hasan@thedailystar.net http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=42589