ICON Plc, a well-known outsourcing services vendor to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries is expanding its presence in the Asia Pacific region. Its most recent expansions include Seoul, Korea, and Singapore. The latest development is their new office in Manila, Philippines.

ICON’s CEO Peter Gray said, “With over 800 employees in 14 Asia-Pac countries and 13 years of successful operations in the region, Asia-Pacific is a key market for ICON. Philippines’ large population, coupled with the country’s well-established network of hospitals, physicians and investigators has made it an attractive location for our clients, and one which we have supported for a number of years through home-based employees. Investing in local support and infrastructure through the office in Manila will ensure that we can support future client demand as they increasingly look to include Asia in their drug development programs.”

Genpact, New Delhi’s biggest business process outsourcing firm has acquired Hello Communications, Inc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hikari Tsushin Inc (First Section of Tokyo Stock Exchange). The deal, which will take from three to five years to mature, and will involve providing services from customer service and finance and accounting to IT infrastructure support and back office processing.

Although the firm is based in Japan, the services will be supplied from Genpact’s delivery centres in China. While Pramod Bhasin, president & CEO of Genpact, declined to disclose the financial aspects of the contract, he said it would require a few hundred people initially and would ramp up as the contract matures. He said that, “This deal is strategic for us as we will be completely servicing this client from China. Moreover, we could look at opening another centre in China by the end of this year to service this client.”

The affiliation with Genpact would permit Hikari Tsushin Inc to provide cost-effective services from China to its customers in Japan while enabling the company to make forays into the fast-growing China market.  Shigetaro Toyoda, CEO of Hello Communications  said, “We are delighted to partner with Genpact and leverage their strong process discipline, quality rigour and business process reengineering expertise to offer best-in-class services to our customers.”

A Chinese group plans to develop the largest contract manufacturing facility based in Beijing. The US$120 million project will be located in the Beijing Yizhuang Development Zone, a business zone with more than 100 existing biopharma ventures.

The concept of contract manufacturing has been increasing, as pharmaceutical firms find ways of improving efficiency and cutting costs. By using outsourcing manufacturing, drug makers are able to have more flexibility and balance production to demand. To take layers of cost out of the production process, companies are finding it’s more cost effective to move manufacturing work to Asia, where low labor costs makes production considerably less expensive than Ain Europe or US.

The Chinese CMO development – with interest from large Pharmaceuticals’ and their aspirations is in good shape and the future looks bright.

Drugmakers are flocking to the economic zone – both for Chinese domestic sales and for the ability to cost effectively supply mainstream international markets. The latest contract manufacturing hub is a venture of Suma Ventures, Autek Bio, and Beijing Yizhuang International Co.

Facebook, the multi-billion dollar leading social networking site to date, launches its first Asian operations office in India, to better facilitate its continuous increase in users. There are over 400 million Facebook users and 100 million Facebook Mobile users and these figures are growing fast.

According to Facebook, the operations office is located in Hyderabad, and will have teams in charge of advertising and developer support. The office will work in conjunction with their other offices in Palo Alto, California; Austin, Texas; and Dublin, Ireland.

Situating their latest centre in India, and following the sun, Facebook aims to establish support centres in different time zones, with 24-hour support and available in different languages.

Don Faul, global online operations director says, “We expect our new office in Hyderabad to tap into the region’s strong pool of talented people who understand operations and technology, and help us more effectively serve the needs of our users, advertisers and developers around the world.”

Since its inception in 2004, the number of Facebook users has rapidly and steadily climbed to over 400 million worldwide. It already has an estimated 8 million users in India.

Technology giant Microsoft has increased the amount of legal work that they outsource, having now signed an agreement with CPA Global, a legal outsourcing provider in India.

Word about the deal spread after Microsoft slashed its legal budget by 15% resulting in a significant decrease in in-house legal department employees. Prior to the budget cut, Microsoft’s legal department had 1,050 staff and a $900 M annual budget.

Assistant General Counsel of Microsoft, Marty Shively, who is now based in India, has been keeping an eye on their company’s outsourcing opportunities.  He says, “We have been outsourcing legal work in the area of patent and trademark to CPA Global and Wipro. We already have a 5-year relationship with CPA Global and hope to strengthen it in the future.”

The majority of the legal work that Microsoft is outsourcing is associated with patent and trademark, docketing and complex portfolio analysis. From time to time, 100 percent of the work has been outsourced and occasionally Microsoft only outsourced sections that can be quickly completed in India.

NEC, Fujitsu to boost outsourcing

The Wall Street Journal reported that Asia’s contract chip producers expect to see their earnings get better this year, as the global financial revival boosts demand, along with more semiconductor companies globally come across to outsource additional production.

Increasing outsourcing orders, particularly from Japanese incorporated device producers such as NEC Electronics and Fujitsu Microelectronics, are expected to raise the earnings of contract chip manufacturers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and United Microelectronics of Taiwan, analysts claim.

Both NEC and Fujitsu are IDMs – established domestic chip producers that handle semiconductor manufacturing. However, as they keep on fighting back with losses, analysts say they are likely to increase outsourcing to keep production costs.

TV producers anticipate Sony outsourcing

According to DigiTimes, Taiwan-based LCD TV manufacturers are likely to account for a big segment of the OEM orders from Sony as the vendor aims to raise its outsourcing capacity, particularly Sony’s three existing associates Wistron, Foxconn Electronics and Compal Electronics.

Sony’s strategy is to boost LCD TV OEM sales, primarily for cheap models, to as much as 40% of its full LCD TV shipments amount in its 2010 financial year. Sony begins discussing among its OEM partners for LCD TV orders for 2011, which may cost up to 15 million units.

Sony distributed 5.4 million LCD TVs in its fiscal third-quarter 2009, up 8% on year. However, proceeds from the partial fall down to $3.76 billion.

Xerox’s BPO industry should deliver

When a company outsources their IT or other business processes, the outsourced firm comes up with a less expensive and more efficient way of handling the work outsourced to them, and that’s valuable. Despite this, outsourced firms rarely reinvent a process entirely – because it’s extremely difficult.

Now that Xerox has spent $6.4 billion in buying ACS, a major player in the business process outsourcing industry, it’s that kind of reinvention that they must deliver.