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Fin24 reports that office space in Cape Town is being snapped up by business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, which have collectively been creating roughly 1,000 jobs a month in the city over the last year.
According to Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, the BPO sector stands out as the fastest-growing employer in the city, with massive international firms such as EXL and Teleperformance rapidly expanding their presence. He was speaking at an event hosted by EXL on Wednesday, to celebrate the creation of 10,000 jobs by the BPO sector in Cape Town between March 2023 and the same month in 2024. The employment data was measured by CapeBPO, a special-purpose vehicle funded by the city to support the BPO sector. BPO operators offer services across a wide range of industries, including accounting, IT services, human resources, and analytics, but are most well-known for offering call centre services on behalf of clients. EXL’s Siddharth Goel said the company's headcount in SA grew from 1,500 to 4,600 in the space of a year. He said that the company focused on medium-to-high complexity jobs as their expectation was that lower complexity tasks would be disrupted by artificial intelligence. Goel said that SA was viewed as having a favourable regulatory environment by BPO companies, which was helping to drive the expansion of firms. He added that the company had been targeting the CBD in Cape Town, in part because of the lower stages of load shedding experienced in the area. Hill-Lewis pointed out that the expansion of these firms had also been a good thing for the property sector in the city, which has seen soaring growth in demand for office space.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by William Brederode at Fin24
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