Business

Oman joins Kearney’s Global Services Location Index

The Sultanate of Oman joined the list of Kearney’s 2023 Global Services Location Index (GSLI), which envisages a country’s ability to reskill and deploy its workforce as a vital part of its attractiveness as an offshore location, for the first time along with six other Middle East countries such as Jordan, KSA, Qatar, Kuwait and Lebanon.

Kearney’s is a global consulting partnership present in more than 40 countries which assesses the Global Services Location Index which are selected based on corporate input, current remote services activity, and government initiatives to promote the sector.

Countries like Jordan, KSA, Qatar, Kuwait and Lebanon joined the list for the first time while the UAE improved on its global ranking, moving up four spots on the list this year to 21st place.

The 78 countries in the 2023 Global Services Location Index were evaluated against 52 metrics across four major categories such as financial attractiveness, people skills and availability, business environment, and digital resonance.

This year, Kearney refocused the Index to be forward-looking and captured digital resonance and talent regenerative capabilities and availability. In the process, a few metrics were dropped from the people skills availability and digital resonance pillars that were focusing on traditional IT, and new digitally focused parameters were added. This along with global trends and key local disruptors led to marked differences in some countries’ rankings.

In Kearney’s 12th edition Global Services Location Index, which studied the vital factors that make countries attractive as potential locations for offshore services, UAE improved its score, with its business environment standing out as its strongest advantage while Jordan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proved to be the two strongest new entrants from the Middle East region.

This year’s Index focused on talent regeneration and digital skills, bringing Canada, Poland, and Singapore into the limelight as emerging technology destinations for establishing innovation hubs.

“In an ever-changing global market landscape, where skills take precedence over cost advantages, a nation's true strength lies in its capacity to foster and unleash the potential of its talented people,” said Rob Van Dale, Middle East and Africa Lead, Digital at Kearney.

“While countries such as UAE and KSA do not naturally have a cost advantage, we see that their considerable focus on talent regeneration is starting to pay off, and in a world where this is expected to become more important, coupled with their investments in digital resonance and an already attractive business environment, they may in the near future further increase their attractiveness for high skilled services catering to their region.”

On the other hand, countries like India, China and Malaysia continued to lead thanks to their immense cost advantage, abundant talent pool, and strong skills. Additionally, India and China also showed signs of strength in talent regeneration capabilities making them global frontrunners in the availability of a tech-enabled workforce, according to Kearney’s Global Services Location Index (GSLI).