For years, Sykes Enterprises of Tampa feted the building of a new call center by holding a news conference with local officials from hamlets such as Scottsbluff, Neb., and Eveleth, Minn.
Its recent news conference was much the same. Except that it was in El Salvador.
A day later, local newspapers published breathless accounts of Sykes' plan to build a call center in the country and hire 400 bilingual Salvadorans to staff it. Many of the articles pointed out that the head count at Sykes' booming operation in Costa Rica has swiftly risen from 200 to 1,500.
Sykes' latest international move is a bold one. Sykes is the first among its competitors to locate in El Salvador, where foreign investment tends to focus less on brainpower than brawn. Investor relations director Subhaash Kumar says Salvadoran economic development officials made the pitch several years ago. Sykes officials first visited the country in March 2002.
An article in El Diario de Hoy suggests El Salvador was barely a consideration back in 2000, when, according to the newspaper, Sykes was pondering expansion to Costa Rica, Jamaica, Panama or the Dominican Republic. Only Costa Rica hosts a Sykes operation today.
When Sykes was building call centers in the United States, it demanded a package of local incentives worth more than $5-million. El Salvador is providing Sykes a mere $400,000 for employee training.
What Salvadoran reporters didn't point out, or didn't know, was that Sykes' explosive overseas growth has been nearly matched by its contraction in the United States. Recently announced closures will leave the company with just 13 U.S. calls centers out of 42 worldwide.
Sykes says it has no choice but to shift its operations to cheaper climes overseas, where lower wages allow the Tampa company and its competitors to charge lower rates.
