About A.T. Kearney
A.T. Kearney is a leading global management consulting firm with offices in more than 40 countries. Since 1926, they have been trusted advisors to the world’s foremost organizations. A.T. Kearney is a partner-owned firm, committed to helping clients achieve immediate impact and growing advantage on their most mission-critical issues.
About the 2019 A.T. Kearney Global Services Location Index (GSLI)
Now in its ninth edition since 2004, the 2019 GSLI helps companies make key location decisions about where to locate offshore operations, and the Index sheds light on their complex and shifting choices. The 50 countries in the 2019 Index are selected based on corporate input, current remote services activity, and government initiatives to promote the sector, including digital preparedness. Each country is evaluated based on 44 metrics that assess its financial attractiveness, people skills and availability, business environment, and digital resonance.
This year’s GSLI report reflects the rising impact of automation and security, A.T. Kearney added a new evaluation category digital resonance, which has the following factors:
- Digital skills of the country’s workforce
- Legal and cybersecurity
- Corporate activity
- Digital outputs
The 2019 GSLI overall country rankings indicate that, at a regional level, Asia continues to dominate the Index. Asian economies represent six of the top seven spots — despite the change in the Index methodology.
Vietnam was ranked top five in the top outsourcing locations in 2019
In this year’s report, Vietnam remains very attractive in terms of cost with its sizable digital workforce pool available for IT outsourcing and BPO. In general, Vietnam was ranked number five (05) moving up one position since the last report. Big foreign companies in the world continue to invest in Vietnam, showing continued momentum for the ICT industry. Since 2000, Japanese IT companies have seen Vietnam as the offshore outsourcing solution for their shortage of labor force. Vietnam is seen as an attractive alternative to China thanks to its low cost, a large pool of skilled software engineers, and cultural similarities.
The Vietnamese government is executing an aggressive plan to develop a more highly skilled workforce, and the country is dedicated to higher education and to fostering English and Japanese proficiency. English has been taught as a foreign language since elementary school. Japanese, French, and German are also taught as a foreign language in some junior high schools.
For more insights on Vietnam outsourcing, read the article: What makes the Vietnam Software Outsourcing amazingly popular
In Digital resonance criteria, Vietnam was ranked #37 with a score of 3.72 due to its lower score in Corporate activity. In the last few years, more and more investments have come to Vietnam startups.
In Cybersecurity investment, Vietnam was grouped in the Nascent group, in the same group with India, China, Phillipe’s, Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, Poland, and Russia.
In summary, Vietnam remains cost-attractive with its large outsourcing worker pool, while the legal framework and cybersecurity investment are in the same group as other top outsourcing locations such as India or Indonesia.
