Fear of China’s and India’s growing strengths as outsourcing and development centres permeated a recent enterprise conference put on by the U.K. government in London, where top technology executives and government leaders met to discuss strategies for developing more business at home.
“By 2015, up to five million American and European jobs could have moved offshore, outsourced to countries like India and China as they strive to become the world’s second and third largest economies,” Gordon Brown, the U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in his opening keynote address at the Advancing Enterprise Conference, held on Jan. 26.
Brown’s sentiments were echoed by local business leaders like Vodafone Group PLC chief executive officer (CEO) Arun Sarin. They stressed the importance of developing international business while keeping core jobs and development money in their home country.
Sarin spoke of Vodafone’s top priority of rolling out new 3G (third-generation) services, driven by an annual investment of