When one thinks of the import business one often imagine importing certain products or items. That is after all the traditional import business. However, the last decade has seen has seen a spike in a particular kind of import business; outsourcing.
When one country has jobs to export, such as the United States of America, another country will have a thriving job import business. This is simply called outsourcing, a process in which a third party is employed to perform a certain task. Call centers of India are probably the most widely known form of outsourcing. The businessmen in India have built a model of import business where they import job contracts from American companies to handle things that can be done over the phone, such as customer service or telemarketing.
China is considered one of the world’s largest exporters, but at the same time China too has long been a thriving centre for import business where businessmen have imported manufacturing job contracts that require large scale factory line production systems.
The importing of jobs and contracts in foreign countries has reached such high proportion that it is about time that it in itself can be considered an import business. However, it is also a controversial form of business model, especially in the United States, where tens of thousands of people have lost jobs at home only to see it exported to another country.
The news agency Reuters got a lot of flack for starting a facility in Bangalore, India, to do business reporting by firing reporters in its international offices. In fact, article writing in itself has become a thriving form of export and import business as has just about everything other production and service oriented work.
This form of export and import business model has had serious consequences though. And it is also a topic that often sparks fiery debates between politicians and policy makers in the United States. In fact, it is also a topic that is part of the conversation in the campaigns of those who are seeking candidacy for the job of an American President in next year’s elections. In order to get the support of the constituency, especially of those who have lost jobs because another country half way across the world imported it.
The reason that this kind of export import business has worked so well for large multinational companies is because corporate companies are largely concerned about increasing the annual revenue and profit and will develop and implement all kinds of plans and mechanisms to do just that. So if it means exporting jobs to businessmen in developing countries who will import it and complete it in a much cheaper rate by international standards but high enough by regional standards, they will do it.
So this is the other side of export and import business, a somewhat untraditional model of the concept. One cannot determine how long it will go on for, but for now it is a thriving business model in developing countries in Asia and Latin America; the other import business.