Business
Tapping Opportunities In New Wired Economies
A quick way forward for Fiji and region
Addressing a select gathering at the University of the South Pacific in early April, Phil Goff, New Zealand's minister for foreign affairs and trade, re-emphasised Fiji's importance as the gateway to Melanesia and Polynesia in his opening remarks. Fiji has long emerged as a leader among the South Pacific islands nations in the areas of commerce, industry, education and tourism.
Despite the political aberrations that have set it back on a couple of occasions, it retains its leadership in the eyes of the world.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
The setback, however, has been felt at its worst on its economy. Analyses point out that economic growth has been painfully slow. A variety of reasons‹from perceived socio-political instability to the problems of the sugar industry‹have been cited for this stagnation. The sugar industry is most certainly the life-blood of the Fiji economy and reams have been written about the need for both its modernisation and reform.
There evidently are no easy solutions to these problems because of a number of reasons including certain socio-political factors that are unique to Fiji‹like matters relating to land. This factor affects Fiji's other vibrant industry, tourism, as well.
While it sorts out the problems in these vital industries, there is little attention being paid by Fiji's opinion makers‹both in politics and business‹to other opportunities which the new wired economies offer: a time has now come for Fiji to seriously look beyond its traditional industries of sugar and tourism.
With the cornucopia of opportunities now available through ICTs (information and communications technologies), a nation like Fiji is well poised to capitalise on its leadership as a harbinger of the new wired economy in the region.
The relevance of ICTs to the Pacific islands environment can hardly be overstated. With such a spread out geography that has been linked only with ancient maritime ties and a slow cross-pollination of cultures and commerce over thousands of years, the technologies of information and communications are a quick way forward to progress in several spheres: information, education, commerce to name only three. And the benefits would not be restricted to Fiji alone‹Fiji could in fact be an engine of growth for the entire region.
In this piece, we will restrict ourselves to the business side of ICTs and how Fiji - and the region‹could reap its benefits without too many significant inputs beyond its capabilities. We will also enumerate the advantages that Fiji and the region have over competing nations elsewhere in the world.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has been growing tremendously after the bursting of the famed techno-bubble on America's bourses in late 2000.
More and more back office operations of America and Europe's mega-corporations are being outsourced to other countries that have more and therefore affordable manpower. Call any American airline from anywhere in the world to check your ticket status and your query will be answered in a completely unexpected nation. I have had calls answered in India, Bolivia and even Australia. The same is the case for credit card and bank enquiries, telephone and online (Internet) help for operating gadgets like mobile phones, laptops, software, queries on utility bills and so on. The list is long‹this is indeed a wonder of the wired world.
BPO projects come in two main flavours. Call centres‹where you set up trained people to answer customer queries in a variety of businesses over telephone or e-mail and actual back office work‹where armies of people are employed in services like data entry, transcription, scanning and digitisation, where they enter, process and send back processed business data within a single business day.
Countries like India, which lack superior infrastructure (power outages are the order of the day), have capitalised on the BPO revolution to provide timely and exceptionally affordable services to corporations worldwide. It may be argued that this is because India has great software talent. That indeed may be the case, but software skills are useful in application development and other high technology areas that we are not even considering here. No special software skills are required in the BPO space.
Fiji has most of the ingredients that are necessary to make it a potential success in the BPO space in the region. In fact, there are few deterrents and almost all of these have to do with regulations that the government, with some vision and of course political will, could easily deal with.
Consider the advantages: With the sun rising here‹and setting in the world's biggest BPO market, the United States - Fiji has a head-start of a whole business day with some hours to spare. That is a tremendous advantage. While America sleeps, Fiji can process the data during its daytime and send it back in time for America's next business day. Fiji also has a great pool of English-speaking people who can easily be trained to understand American accents and speak in easily intelligible neutral accents (the call centre companies have remarkably quick ways of training people for these jobs‹thousands of Indians, not natural speakers of English, have been trained as successful call centre operators over the last few years).
Wages in Fiji too are markedly less than in the developed economies. No elaborate software knowledge is required for these jobs. Add to this, the Fiji people's natural friendliness that is famed all over the world and the culture of good service that is concomitant‹and you have a formula for success.
Urban Fiji also has an excellent telecommunications, electricity and utilities infrastructure that are crucial to the success of any business venture in the new economy. What's more, Fiji could also capitalise on its great fame as a holiday destination to lure expatriates who would be required to come here for technical support and training. Most of all, businesses of the new economy are not dependent on massive tracts of land, unlike sugar and tourism. The government could therefore move very fast on such projects.
So, why is all this not happening? The reasons are not far to seek. Fiji still needs to project itself as a safe investment destination for new economy projects, which is not an insurmountable task if the government specifically addresses issues that are special to this sector.
There would have to be reform in telecom regulations to allow cheaper and broader Internet bandwidths, permission to employ technologies like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and other measures that would attract investment. Operating these businesses at existing bandwidth rates would certainly prove unattractive. Bringing in competition in basic services would also send the right signals to the global investor. An all-round telecom/Internet policy that would allow a potential investor to hedge his capital investment across several services (including basic services, given the small population) would have to be arrived at.
No government could be expected to have the expertise and the legal wherewithal to usher in these changes. Techno-economic experts both from the region and elsewhere would need to be consulted. A legal framework with a new set of regulations will have to be evolved. Potential domestic and overseas investors would have to be sold on the ideas. None of this is difficult to achieve. Many countries even with controlled economies have embarked on a similar path and are reaping the benefits.
These precedents and business models could be studied in-depth and adapted to incorporate regional needs. The proposed formation of the rather quaintly named non-profit set-up, Telecom Oversight Committee of Fiji (TOC), may be a step in the right direction.
The onus of larger issues like projecting Fiji as a socio-politically stable investment destination, of course, lies entirely on the government of the day. The ship of e-opportunities is already on Fiji's shores. Its people can ill-afford to miss it. The right moves from the government could clear the atmosphere for the money to flow in into a slew of new technology businesses‹and transform Fiji and the region sooner than we could think.
Dev Nadkarni is the coordinator of the journalism programme at the University of the South Pacific and a senior lecturer in print and online journalism. He has also worked in the ICT industry previously. The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of his employers.
