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The Costa Rican Coalition for Development Initiatives, (CINDE) has announced that 20 new multi-national companies are planning to begin conducting business here in 2009, despite the global economic crisis. These companies are in the services and medical products sectors, which have been the least effected by the economic downturn. Cinde is the organization devoted to promoting the country at the international level in order to bring new companies to invest here. The arrival of new businesses will generate many new jobs and should offset any serious deterioration of employment during the current global crisis.
CRHB
Medical field yes, but service sector is stagnant worldwide, even tourism. Hawaii has a 58% ocupancy rate these days. With the majority of business down, the service sector follows unless you are a niche business like keeping foreclosed home pools clean.
Medical is growing everywhere (even US all he hospitals are adding or remodeling) + the CR med. tourism business needs the support infrastructure. Bottom line from a bus. perspective is that you have an educated workforce with the bonus of being less expensive by a greater than typ. corp. profit margins in US. Good for CR! Besides medical, the only other growing sector in US is education and US Customs/Border Patrol = (nationalism rearing its ugly commerce killing head).The Services Sector in Costa Rica is comprised of Call Centers, Shared Services and Back Offices
The most dynamic segment in the services sector in Costa Rica during the last few years has been Call Centers which can be categorized into two main areas:
Customer Service: Customer service call centers require from its workforce the ability to speak English fluently. All of these companies find in Costa Rica’s labor force the quality and the language skills that enable them to provide world-class services worldwide.
Technical Support: Choosing the right location for a service operation requires considering many critical factors, such as: proximity to market, availability of a highly ethical and skilled labor force, a good technological infrastructure and a stable political and economic environment.
In a recent A.T. Kearney survey, Costa Rica was classified among the best 25 countries in the world to establish offshore operations, based on an index that considers people skills and availability, as well as the business environment and its financial structure. Costa Rica, which ranks as the 16th ideal location in this study, is cited as a country that “offers competitive costs, the best English-language proficiency among the Latin American countries surveyed, and a relatively friendly business environment – for example, the government has set up free trade zones that offer tax and other benefits”
Corporate strategies worldwide oriented towards reducing operational costs have been the driving force behind most of the big companies’ decisions to establish shared services off-shore operations. Finding a location with the right combination of skilled bilingual labor force, telecommunications infrastructure and adequate proximity to main offices, are the key factors for these type of projects. Specifically, the skill set demanded by these enterprises vary in a wide range of specialized areas that typically include finance, accounting, information technology, legal and human resources, in most of the cases. That, of course, comes in addition to the English language proficiency requirement, and even other languages such as Portuguese.
The Global Business Services operation that Procter & Gamble opened in year 1999 in Costa Rica showcases the possibilities and opportunities that this country has to offer. Today, from San Jose, Costa Rica, the GBS provides services to P&G operations and their business relations throughout the Americas, as part of the global strategy of the corporation. Other Shared Services operations include Chiquita Brands, GTC, Baxter Americas Services and British American Tobacco SSC. There are many other outsourcing operations of companies such as Hewlett Packard and IBM that have created a platform to serve their clients from their centers. Costa Rica also hosts regional offices and headquarters for several Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, Pfizer, Roche, 3M, Kimberly Clark, Cisco, Microsoft and Oracle, among others. Lastly, the availability of a very productive work force enables the operation of data processing centers in Costa Rica, such as the ones operated by Equifax and Maersk Americas.
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