Source Code China: The New Global Hub of IT (Information Technology) Outsourcing

Chapter 10. China 2020

While there are several scenarios that provide various outlooks for the global economy in 2020 and how the China market will be a part of it, this chapter assumes that the basic model for sourcing technology and related support services holds as it is known today.

The year 2020 is not that far away, yet making a leap forward to envision what the technology outsourcing industry environment will look like then, takes a lot of analysis, reflection, and modeling.

The next 12 years will witness an unprecedented buildup of a giant technology and information processing-related services industry in China, both to fuel its rapidly growing domestic market, but also to satisfy the vast demand for global offshore talents. Why?

Pillar of the Economy: Focus on the High-Tech Sector

Earlier in this book, we touched on the priority that the government has given the technology sector. We also covered the education emphasis of the Chinese culture and how the Ministry of Education restructured its curriculum ten years ago to ramp up the output of technology-related majors.

This started to gain momentum and became clear in 2003, when the world saw the numbers for computer sciences and software graduates in China go over the 100,000 annual graduates mark, currently reaching 140,000. For the first time, a second market emerged to supply a large pool of tech talent, with figures above 100,000 tech graduates per year.

Just how amazing is it that just three years later, 2006 saw that number ...