FIRSTSOURCE, ONE of India's leading outsourcing companies, is expected to unveil a multimillion-pound investment for Derry later this week which is likely to create hundreds of new jobs.
The company, which provides call centre and business process management services, currently employs more than 500 people in the northwest and more than 400 in Belfast.
Firstsource (formerly ICICI OneSource) was the first Indian-based business process outsourcing (BPO) company to directly invest in Northern Ireland. The Indian group, which lists leading Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies among its clients, provides support to the banking and financial services sector and telecom, media and healthcare sectors.
Latest full-year results to March posted by Firstsource yesterday show the group delivered a strong performance across all of its operations in India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina and the Philippines.
Its operating EBIT was 1,479 million rupees (€23.4 million) on a total income of 13,337 million rupees (€211.4 million)
The North's Economy Minister Nigel Dodds met senior executives from the company during his trade mission to India earlier this year and spent a considerable amount of time encouraging them to further develop their Northern Ireland centres.
Firstsource came to the North in 2006 but it is just one of a number of companies from the Indian sub-continent who have chosen Northern Ireland as an investment location.
There are now a growing cluster of Indian-headquartered companies including HCL, which employs more than 2,000 people in Belfast and Armagh, Polaris software Lab, Tech Mahindra and Pix Transmission.
There is a serious shortage of skilled workers in India as a result of the economic boom.
:quality(70)/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/irishtimes/af31bc09-7749-42ce-8c5c-b999c04f979b.png)
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/VR3765MFOBH2NMV2QNICYDF67M.png)