Information technology experts on Tuesday said there was scope for earning huge foreign exchange from call centres as the global market for shared services is likely to grow to $1.43 trillion by the end of 2009 from the present $1,000 billion.

They hoped that with the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission taking the initiative to give licenses for call centres from April 7, an estimated 200 call centres are going to be set up within the current year.

About 40 international call centres are expected to be set up along the other two hundred domestic market-based service providers, said Morshed Hossain Bhuiyan, director of privately owned One Call.

A call centre usually handles services like customer support, lead generation, emergency response, telephone answering service, inbound response and outbound telemarketing.

The BTRC will provide license for individuals or companies under two types — hosted call centre and hosted call centre services.

Sachin Bhatia, technical solution partner of One Call and vice-president of India’s Dristi-soft Private Limited, said Bangladesh has a good prospect as the country has a large number of smart young people who are interested to get into the call centre business.

India has tremendous growth of call centre business, he said, adding that in 1999-2000 the turnover was $65 million which grew to more than $10 billion in 2006.

Foreign companies dominate India’s call centre industry, with 60 per cent share of the annual Rs 71 billion ($1.5 billion) turnover market, Bhatia informed.

The United States leads the global market of offshore-outsourced call centres. Currently the US market has 3,20,000 outsourced agent positions, representing 11.2 per cent of the country’s total number that is expected to grow to about 3,61,000 by the end of this year.

Morshed Hossain Bhuiyan said several things are very important for the entrepreneurs of this sector — marketing, both in the domestic and international sectors, technical solutions and human resource training.

Morshed said telecommunication sector, financial sector, entertainment industry, travel and tourism, manufacturing, distribution and wholesale, public sectors and social awareness programme could be the domestic market for the call centres.

He informed that his company had organised an orientation programme on how to set up a call centre.

About 270 interested entrepreneurs registered to get the initial information about the concept at the programme held at the Sundarban Hotel in the Dhaka city on Tuesday.

‘We have a plan to provide a three-month training on call centre which will start on April 15 at our Banani office’, added the director of Call One.

Eastern Banks’ SME banking development manager Anwarul Faruq Talukder told New Age that their bank is interested to finance call centre entrepreneurs as the business seems very lucrative for Bangladesh.

‘We may finance about 40 to 50 per cent which will depend on the entrepreneurs’ investment and other criteria’, he added.